by Daniel Kalla
Dressed in the straw hat and ragged pants of a coolie, Joey arrived rolling a honey wagon ahead of him like a wheelbarrow. Even the normally unflappable Simon was distressed by the stench that seeped out from the oversized barrel.
“I washed it myself, Mr. Simon,” Joey explained apologetically. “And look.” He reached into the barrel and pulled out a worryingly full bucket of waste.
Franz and Simon peered inside the barrel and saw that the space beneath the bucket, where Simon was to hide, appeared relatively clean. Simon looked a little green, but he forced a chuckle. “Wonder if my family back home still thinks I’m living in the lap of luxury.”
Joey brought a hand to his chest. “Boss, with me driving, it will be a short ride.”
Simon motioned to the sloshing bucket. “Slow and steady, Joey, while I’m riding under that thing.” He closed his eyes. “Slow and steady.”
Franz patted Simon’s shoulder. “It will not be too long.”
Simon breathed through his mouth. “I can survive an hour or two. I think.”
“I meant that we will soon find somewhere more suitable for you to live.”
“I’m kind of looking forward to rooming with Ernst,” Simon said. “I get a kick out of him. He’s so cynical—he would make a good Jew. A good New Yorker, too, for that matter.”
“Except he lives in the heart of Germantown.”
“So what?” Simon rolled his eyes. “I’m not marching in any parades.”
“The last time Sunny visited, Baron von Puttkamer came over unannounced.”
“I’ll keep a low profile,” Simon promised. “As long as I am near Essie and my boy, I don’t care if I have to hide under the sofa while Göring and Goebbels have tea.”
Joey helped Simon into the barrel. As he crouched down inside, he looked back up at Franz with uncharacteristic hesitation. “This . . . this can’t last forever, can it?”
“The tide is turning against the Japanese and the Germans,” Franz said, hoping he didn’t sound as half-hearted as he felt.
“Ready, boss?” Joey asked.
Simon gave him a wry grin. “Remember, Joey: slow and steady.”
The young man slid the waste-filled bucket into the slot above his head and carefully wedged it into place.
Franz was still thinking about Simon as the door to the flat opened and Esther entered, holding Jakob over her shoulder. As soon as she lowered the baby to the floor, he stirred, reaching for his favourite wooden rattle, giving it a drowsy shake.
Franz noticed Esther’s pallor. “What is the matter, Essie?”
“Oh, that man . . .” Her voice was shaky.
“What man?”
“Mr. Ghoya.”
“What has he done now?”
Esther’s eyes swept down to Jakob before focusing on Franz. “I went to see him to ask for a pass to visit Simon.”
“And?”
“He asked me all sorts of strange questions. Still, he seemed to be in a good mood. Everyone in line had said so. He even signed my pass.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Well, he asked me where I lived.” She squeezed her forehead. “When I told him, Ghoya asked if I knew you.”
As Franz rose to his feet, the wounds on his back throbbed. “You didn’t tell him that you lived with Hannah and me, did you?”
“I didn’t know what to say. That little man, he became so agitated. He started screaming.” Her face crumpled. “He jumped onto his desk, Franz! Can you imagine? Such a scene.”
“You told him?”
“Only that you used to be my brother-in-law. Not that we lived together.”
“What did he say?”
Esther slumped down into the chair that Franz had just vacated. “Ghoya said that no one in our family would ever leave the ghetto again. No, he didn’t say it. He shrieked it.”
“Oh, Essie.”
“What am I to do?” Esther murmured. “I will never be allowed out, and Simon cannot get back inside. He will never see his son again.”
“Yes, he will,” Sunny said from the doorway. “I will take Jakob to him.”
Chapter 36
October 18, 1943
Jakob hadn’t made a sound during their journey through the International Settlement, but despite the baby’s cooperation, they made slow progress. Sunny stopped to feed him a bottle of milk and then again a block later to change his diaper in the backroom of a teashop that was run by a friendly old Shanghainese woman. Sunny couldn’t resist taking other breaks along the way, too, to rub noses with him, tickle his belly or swoosh him through the air—anything to elicit another one of his giggles.
Sunny was happy for the distraction. She’d spent much of the past few days, and sleepless nights, thinking about her last conversation with Wen-Cheng. Two days earlier, he had whispered a request to meet her in private. As soon as they were alone in the staff room, Wen-Cheng asked, “Have you found a way into Kubota’s office yet?”
She held out a hand, palm up. “I cannot do it.”
“Cannot or will not?”
“You, too, Wen-Cheng?” She hung her head. “Does it really matter which?”
“No.” He sighed. “It’s better this way. Whatever the Underground intends for you to do will only have terrible consequences.”
“What will they do now?”
“The old man and the others, they have grown impatient.”
“So they will make other plans?”
“I believe they already have.”
She hesitated. “What does that mean for me?”
He broke off eye contact. “I . . . I am not certain.”
“These men. They are fighting for China. For us.”
“It’s true.” He paused and then added, “And they will do whatever they deem necessary to protect their cause.”
There was no mistaking his tone. Sunny shivered. “I see.”
“I never should have let it come to this.”
“Stop it, Wen-Cheng. We have been through this too many times.”
Wen-Cheng’s expression was suddenly melancholic. “If only I had had the courage five years ago to leave my wife. It could have been so different for us.”
Sunny reached a hand out but stopped short of touching him. “Everything has happened for a reason. You cannot blame yourself.”
“I feel no blame, Sunny. Only regret.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she bit her lip and nodded.
His expression hardened. “You will be all right, Sunny. That I promise you.”
She smiled. “Wen-Cheng, what can you possibly do?”
“Whatever I have to,” he murmured and then repeated in a firmer tone, “Whatever I have to.”
Sunny shook off the unsettling memory of the determined look in Wen-Cheng’s pale eyes. She pulled Jakob against her chest. It felt so natural to cradle him that way. She wondered again when she and Franz might have a baby of their own, though she recognized the absurdity of the thought, particularly in light of what Wen-Cheng had implied about the Underground’s intentions.
As Sunny reached the edge of Germantown, she saw swastikas fluttering overhead like laundry on a clothesline. Before she had met Franz—before war had decimated Shanghai—she used to giggle through the newsreels that played before the matinees, the goose-stepping Nazis with their ubiquitous flags. She thought of the nightclub comedian she had once seen: his Hitler impersonation had evoked convulsions of laughter from the audience.
No one was laughing anymore.
Sunny made eye contact with a tall European man in a homburg who stood on the other side of the street. He returned her gaze, but his expression was hostile. She turned and hurried up the steps to Ernst’s apartment. Without thinking, she rapped on the door using the secret knock she shared with Jia-Li.
“Ja?” Er
nst asked through the door. “Who’s there?”
“Sunny.”
The door flew open and Ernst stepped out in a tattered, paint-speckled shirt. A cigarette burned between his fingers. “Well, if it isn’t my mixed-blooded courtesan herself,” he joked, kissing her on both cheeks and pulling her by the elbow inside the flat. He nodded at Jakob. “And look. You’ve come bearing gifts.”
Even more canvases now cluttered the small room. Some lay on the floor while others were stacked against the walls. Most of them appeared unfinished, with whole sections that were sketched and uncoloured, or completely blank. She even spotted a portrait of herself—presumably sketched to cover Ernst’s lies about their relationship—propped against the wall.
Simon’s head popped out from the corridor. As soon as he spotted Jakob, he dashed across the room with arms outstretched. “My boy!”
Simon eased Jakob out of Sunny’s arms and covered his head in kisses. He brought his face up to his son’s and cooed. Jakob responded with a happy squeal. Simon laughed. “Name one thing in this world that smells as good as my boy—just one thing!”
“Have you ever cracked open a fresh bottle of Hennessy?” Ernst asked. “Its bouquet is not of this world. Beyond compare.”
“Do you hear that, Jake?” Simon said. “Uncle Ernst thinks you don’t smell as good as hooch.”
“Please, never ‘hooch,’” Ernst protested. “Only the world’s most delicious cognac.”
Simon glanced at Sunny. “Where’s Essie?”
“She couldn’t come, Simon.”
His back stiffened slightly. “She’s okay, though?”
“She couldn’t secure a pass.”
“Next time,” Simon assured his son. “Mommy will visit Daddy next time, isn’t that right, fella?”
Sunny laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Esther can’t leave the ghetto, Simon.”
His face fell. “Ever?”
Sunny told him about Esther’s run-in with Ghoya. Simon gritted his teeth. “That miniature tyrant. He can’t stop us.”
“Of course he can, Simon. Dwarf or not. In this new world, all that matters is the size of the gun,” Ernst muttered. “Those with the biggest, they make the rules now.”
Simon bounced Jakob in his arms. “I’m sick of their stupid rules,” he exclaimed.
“What choice is there?” Sunny asked.
Simon looked up at her with a sad, almost apologetic, smile. “Look, Sunny, I know what a burden I’ve become for you all. I hate it. But I have no choice. It’s my family. I got out of the internment camp to be close to them. Same for the Comfort Home. And I will leave here, too—in a heartbeat—to see Essie again.”
“Simon, what happened with Ghoya . . . it’s all still very raw,” Sunny said sympathetically. “See what the next few weeks bring before you do anything rash.” She stopped herself from offering any hollow reassurances about Ghoya reconsidering.
“She’s right.” Ernst extracted a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered one to Simon, who, to Sunny’s surprise, accepted.
With the baby in his arms, Simon waved off Ernst’s lighter. Instead, he tucked the cigarette behind his ear. “I can wait a week, maybe two. But no longer, I swear. I will go right out of my head.”
“A week or two,” Ernst echoed through a cloud of smoke. “In that time, I will transform you into a painter.” He gestured toward one of the smaller canvases propped up against the wall. “Look, Sunny. The work of our American hero. What do you think?”
Sunny overcame her surprise and stepped closer to examine the painting: a greenish-blue vase bursting with yellow daffodils. Although it looked amateurish beside Ernst’s work, it wasn’t bad. “I had no idea you could paint, Simon.”
“You gotta be kidding, Sunny,” he grunted. “Poor old Van Gogh must be spinning in his grave.”
“I doubt that tortured soul ever stops spinning,” Ernst said. “Still, Sunny is correct. You have ability. That one is rubbish, of course.” He waved his hand at the paintings scattered around the room. “But really not so different from the tripe I paint these days.”
Simon pointed at a stack of canvases in the far corner. “Show her the real one, Ernst.”
“Ach, why would she be interested?”
Sunny nodded encouragingly. “Please, Ernst. Show me.”
“It’s hardly more than a doodle.” He exhaled a puff of smoke. “I had to do something of . . . of substance before I went out of my mind with this flea market work.”
Sunny stepped over to the corner of the room.
“The one closest to the wall,” Simon instructed.
Sunny moved two large canvases aside, picked up a smaller one buried behind them and turned it outward. At first glance, she mistook the subject of the portrait for Jia-Li. On closer inspection, she saw that the model had a fuller figure and a wider face than Jia-Li’s, with crow’s feet that had yet to visit the corners of her friend’s eyes. Still, the woman’s expression hinted at the boredom she so often saw in Jia-Li’s. Ernst had painted the woman in the same stark style of his pre-war portraits: naked on her back, with legs crossed and arms held above her head, hands folded behind her neck. Sunny could not tell whether the woman was lying on a mattress or the ground, since the background was unpainted. Her skin was nearly as pale the canvas but for her pink nipples and the wisps of dark hair between her legs. But Sunny was most struck by the ragged horizontal lines that ran up the woman’s arms like rungs of a ladder.
The scars reminded her of a teenager she used to see at the Country Hospital. The girl had witnessed the rape and murder of her own mother during a Japanese raid, from inside the wicker box where the woman had hidden her. In the ensuing months, her father brought the girl to the hospital on several occasions for care of self-inflicted slash wounds to her wrists. One day, the man returned to the hospital alone to tell Sunny that his daughter had cut the artery too deeply for anyone to help.
Sunny angled her head to study the painting. “What does it represent, Ernst?”
“Represent?” Ernst snorted. “Nothing. It’s just a painting.”
“I see beauty and vulnerability,” Simon said. “And pain, of course. Agonizing pain. All those scars on her arms that will never heal.”
“Such nonsense,” Ernst scoffed. “You sound exactly like Franz, finding meaning where there is none. All this symbolizes is my revulsion over having to paint yet another Brandenburg Gate or Alpine meadow for those Nazi philistines.”
At the mention of the Germans, Sunny peeled her eyes from the canvas. “Ernst, that dinner at von Puttkamer’s? Did you go?”
“I did, yes.”
“What was it like?”
“The food was divine. There was a scrumptious sauerbraten. The meat was done to perfection, and it was served with delicious claret. The company, on the other hand . . .” He exhaled heavily.
“Who was there?” Sunny asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Obersturmführer this, and Sturmhauptführer that. All those self-important fools and their pompous titles and uniforms. Like a bunch of children playing dress-up.”
“What about the ghetto?” Sunny asked. “Did they talk about their plans for the refugees?”
“Only in the vaguest terms,” Ernst admitted. “I tried to bring it up with von Puttkamer, but he said he didn’t want to discuss anything so unpleasant at such a happy occasion.”
“So unpleasant?” Sunny balled her hands into fists. “What did he mean by that?”
“Who knows? The baron probably spouts anti-Semitic rhetoric in his sleep. After dinner, when von Puttkamer was really quite sauced, I asked him again. He just carried on about showing ‘those Jews’ what’s what and suchlike. No specifics at all.”
“Perhaps they have given up?”
“You heard what von Puttkamer said—right here in this very ro
om.” Ernst shook his head. “No. They have a plan.”
Simon hoisted Jakob above his head. The baby squealed again in delight. “Maybe we need a plan of our own.”
“A plan for what?” Sunny asked.
“Dealing with the baron.”
“Here we go again.” Ernst turned to Sunny. “Our American friend here spends half his time scheming. He believes we can cripple the Third Reich with a decisive attack on Germantown. Apparently Shanghai, not the Eastern Front, is Hitler’s Achilles heel.”
“Why not?” Simon demanded.
Sunny’s nerves felt raw. “Why not what?”
“Deal with von Puttkamer. A pre-emptive strike.”
“You are not serious, Simon?” she gasped.
As Simon rocked Jakob his face turned to stone. “Would it be better to just sit back and wait for those animals to attack the ghetto? To just hope they don’t kill too many women and children?”
* * *
Sunny left Ernst’s flat feeling more disheartened than ever. Even Jakob, nestling in her chest and snoring softly, could not lift her spirits. Sunny could see that Simon was serious. She understood his point, too. Perhaps an attack on von Puttkamer was their best hope for protecting the ghetto.
“It would never work,” she murmured to herself. The Nazis reminded her of some kind of multi-headed Hydra. Lopping off one head would only engender angrier replacements.
Her sense of suffocation intensified as she crossed back over the Garden Bridge and re-entered Hongkew. Threats seemed to lurk in every nook and cranny these days: the Japanese, the Nazis and even the Underground—her own people. She glanced down at Jakob in her arms. I must be out of my mind to even fantasize about bringing a baby into such a dangerous world.
As she reached the intersection, Sunny saw the ghetto checkpoint a few blocks ahead. She was about to cross the street but paused when she saw an approaching motorcade. Two motorcycles rushed toward her, followed by a military car with a Rising Sun flapping from its antenna.
The vehicles slowed to round the corner, and Sunny spotted two uniformed officers sitting together in the back seat. The one closest to the window was Colonel Kubota. Their eyes met momentarily, and she saw a hint of a smile cross his lips before the car drove away.
