Elena stood on the Garden Bridge and regarded the blooms bobbing and slipping between sampans and barges. Pale blossoms, so fresh their velvet petals still curled, floated on the clogged black river. Soon water from a ship’s wake would soak them. Iridescent oil splattering off a bargeman’s pole would stain them and weigh them down. Or the rain, curdling now out of the cold mist, would pound them under. Elena had watched all of it happen before. None of the river’s flowers ever traveled far. Most did not get beyond the harbor; very few escaped Shanghai, she was sure; and certainly none reached the villages in China’s interior where mourners had prayerfully sent them.
The body these were meant to accompany had probably sunk to the bottom already.
The first time Elena had seen this soft white hope on the river Johann had been holding her hand, pointing the flowers out. Johann had learned about the burials in their first months in Shanghai, when Elena was still learning about the stench of the river, about the insects and billowing heat of summer, the coal smoke and cold of winter, the rains and never-ending damp of all seasons, about hunger and noise and the crush of people whose words she didn’t understand.
Johann said Chinese ghosts could only find rest among their ancestors, in their family villages. People from the interior who died in Shanghai were sent home for burial. The well-to-do placed the coffins on oxcarts for the long trek. The poor couldn’t even afford the coffins. They sprinkled their dead with flowers, brought them to the riverbank, and slipped them gently into the water, to make their own way home.
Jews can rest anywhere, while we wait for the Messiah, Johann said. It’s lucky for us, since we have no homes.
Johann rested now, waiting, in the Israeli Cemetery on Point Road.
A shout broke above the honking and the traffic behind her. Elena turned. The Japanese guard was stabbing at the air with his bayonet, ordering her to move on. She hunched her shoulders and rejoined the crowd trudging across the rusted steel grate of the Garden Bridge.
At home in Prague—Johann had been wrong, they had once had a home—they’d lived in a tiny house and Elena had a tiny garden. She’d grown roses, red ones and pink ones and white ones pale and ghostly as the chrysanthemums in this river. They cascaded over the front fence for all who passed by to see.
In Shanghai the gardens hid behind walls, waved the tops of their trees like teasing fingers above solid brick, poured the scent of unseen flowers into the air in areas where Jews were not permitted to walk.
At the far side of the bridge where it gave onto the Bund, the flow of the crowd narrowed and slowed. Elena peered to see the reason. Outside the guard station, three Chinese women lay flat on the walkway, touching their foreheads to the cold steel in kowtows to the Japanese guards, who berated them in a language the women did not understand for infractions they probably had not committed. The rain was now falling hard. The women’s clothes were heavy, sodden. One shivered uncontrollably but none were allowed to rise. When, finally, the shivering one looked up, one of the guards, small and thin and enveloped in his oilcloth raincoat, kicked her in the mouth. Bleeding now, weeping silently, the woman returned to her kowtow. The other two did not move.
Elena walked on. Scenes like these played out across Shanghai every minute of every day. The Chinese and the Japanese shared a mutual, burning hatred as deep as any cold-eyed Aryan’s hatred of Jews. The Japanese ruled China now, with a casual brutality toward the Chinese that had ignited Johann’s fury. Elena, terrified, had pulled him away from a confrontation with Japanese soldiers more than once, as she had from brownshirts in the streets of Prague. You’ll get killed, she pleaded with him, here as she had there, and no one will be saved.
In Johann’s final days, the Shema on his lips as he lay devoured by the typhoid fever sweeping through the ghetto, Elena had been struck by this bitter thought: she had prevented him from dying a hero. But she could not prevent him from dying.
Elena trudged on. Last month there was a day in which Ghoya, the Japanese commandant of the Jewish ghetto, felt dyspeptic and abruptly left his office before an hour had ended. The long line of people waiting to see him was angrily told to disperse, as though their coming had caused the Major’s illness. Those who had not yet gotten their passes could not leave the ghetto that week for work or school—the only reasons Jews could leave at all. Elena was among them; it was a week of more hunger than usual, more hours spent staring at the wall in the tiny attic room, huddled in the blanket, trying to stay warm. Through a schoolboy fortunate enough to have been at the head of the line, Elena sent a message to the French dressmaker in Foochow Road for whom she worked, informing her what had happened and begging her to retain Elena’s position until Elena could return. The following week, when she’d gotten a pass again, Elena sewed as late into the night as the pass allowed. She made up all the work she’d missed, left the shop each night with burning eyes and a pounding head, and also took with her the understanding that were it to happen again Madame Fornier would have no choice but to replace her with a Chinese girl. The Chinese had no understanding of fashion, no sense even of culture, Madame Fornier said. She much preferred employing a European, even a Jew, who valued the art of couture. But her customers must not be kept waiting and the Chinese girls could handle a needle and would do as they were told.
Elena, who could no longer remember what value couture had at all except to keep her, barely, from starving, nodded dumbly and bent to her sewing.
Work and study, those were the only reasons Jews could leave the ghetto, with the exception of funerals. That concession had allowed Elena to bury Johann in sanctified ground, but she had not been permitted back to the cemetery in the six months since. Perhaps that was to the good. In Prague Elena had gone every Shabbos to her parents’ graves. Beside a nearby headstone a thin, pale widow could be found, sitting and talking to her late husband. She gave him news of the children and asked his advice. Elena now walked in the world without Johann. Bereft and dazed in this city he had come to love, and she to loathe, in the short years of their life together here, she feared her longing might drive her to do the same: to spend her days near him, and her nights also, were she once permitted to visit the place where he now lay.
Though they had no children of whom to bring him news. Johann had hoped they would, had wanted to start their family in China, to triumphantly return to Prague when the war ended with children born in exile as proof the Jews could not be destroyed. But in the three years of their life in China, as in their single year in the tiny house in Prague before the fires and smashed windows and jackboots forced their desperate flight, Elena had not conceived.
And what advice could she ask Johann for, what could he offer? Advice implied a choice to be made. For Elena, Shanghai offered no choices, just a daily struggle to live, to eat, to stay warm in winter, to breathe in summer. A drowning swimmer doesn’t need advice on how furiously to stroke.
Elena clutched her worn wool coat more closely in the spitting rain. Her pass required her to walk along Nanking Road, and while she usually kept to the far side of the street, today in her weariness she sheltered under the colonnade. She avoided this arched walkway when she could, so as not to pass the former Grand Café, now a German beer hall. The Grand Café had relocated to Hong Kew when all Jews and their businesses had been compelled to, and it was doing well enough. But in this first location she and Johann, desperately poor but still full of hope, had spent what Elena even now recalled as happy Sunday afternoons. The café smelled of coffee and cinnamon; Yiddish was the language of the menus and the signs. They could barely pay the rent on the one room they lived in, but she and Johann nevertheless came nearly every week to the Grand Café for kaffee mit schlag and a shared piece of chocolate torte. That night, and the next, there would be no dinner but boiled rice. But Elena would sit with her back to the windows, so she could not see China; and sometimes there was news of home, or of the war, sometimes Herr Baumann played his violin, and always the ardent discussions of Zionism and atheism and art, of God and no God and the death of God, the raised Yiddish voices and the glass pastry case and the hubbub made Elena think for a moment not that she was back in Prague, never that, but that life would again be possible someday.
It would not. Johann was gone. The war continued, the stories whispered out of Europe so horror-drenched that Elena would no longer hear them. She had not read a Yiddish newspaper since Johann’s death. She did not visit the new Grand Café, she did not go to shul, to the mikvah, she could not go to the cemetery. She went to work, to her room, to work again; she cooked her rice and sometimes a carrot or an onion. She bought boiling water from the boy across the street and made tea. There was no sugar, no milk.
The rain pounded through the night and into the morning. Weak daylight leaked into Elena’s room as she struggled to put on her still-damp coat. Without breakfast, because she had nothing left to eat, without tea, because she had no coins for the boiling-water boy, Elena headed once again through the streets of the ghetto. Always, she took the same path to the Garden Bridge although in the ghetto, and only here, a Jew was free to make choices. She would spend the day sewing silk gowns and wool skirts for German and French officers’ wives. Today she would be paid, so she would have rice to eat tonight.
On the river the roofs of the sampans ran with water; the polemen’s wide straw hats dripped rain onto their thin backs. No blossoms floated today. Jewish schoolchildren, for whom Shanghai was still more than a tangle of reek and damp, of aching for the past and dread of the future, skipped along the walkway with their satchels. In front of Elena a married couple held hands and spoke quietly, heads inclined toward one another. The day would separate them, but they would return to each other in the evening, they would sit together over tea. A trickle of icy water inched down Elena’s neck. She didn’t reach to tighten her collar.
As the rain drove down harder the paces of people around her quickened. Elena found she could not bring her feet to move faster. She was soaked and cold and she did not feel strong. A commotion at the end of the bridge spread the crowd like pond ripples moving back from a thrown stone. People slipped around the shouting if they could; a wave surged back from it. As much as Elena could not speed her steps, she also found she could not slow them. She continued mechanically trudging and passed through the slackened and the stopped, to find herself at the guard station looking on with a group of her fellows as the thin, oilcloth-coated guard cursed and kicked a bundle on the steel grate. The bundle cried out, and Elena saw it was a Chinese woman, weeping, her arms trying uselessly to protect both her head and her pregnant belly. Three Chinese men struggled to hold a fourth, who shouted her name and pulled against their grip, desperate to reach her. Dully, Elena thought, That must be her husband. That must be their child, being stomped from her womb. His friends were right to hold him, though. Attacking the guard would certainly mean death.
Elena had not been able to speed nor slow; now she could not stop. With a howl she flew at the shocked guard, thrust him away, nearly knocked him over. “Run!” she screamed at the girl. “Go!” Of course she spoke in Yiddish and of course the girl did not understand. But as the guard’s oilcloth slithered in Elena’s grip, the girl staggered to her feet. The crowd parted for her and then came together again with the finality of the Red Sea drowning the soldiers of Egypt. The girl, her husband, his friends all disappeared. Gloved hands and oilcloths and enraged Japanese faces swirled around Elena. A guard behind her seized her coat but she released the buttons and in her thin blouse she ran, not along the walkway but three steps across it, to the railing. A foot in the grille and one on the rail and she was standing high. One teetering moment; then a hand grabbed her ankle and she half-turned. A snarling guard shouted an order. Her free foot kicked out, catching him in eye. He stumbled back, letting her go. She swayed; she desperately tried to maintain her balance so she could turn back, to face the river.
She would do this. It would not be done to her.
Surprised to hear her own voice repeating the Shema, Elena stepped off the Garden Bridge. She spread her arms wide to embrace the cold, black water, where today no blossoms floated.