Shanghai Shadows

by Lois Ruby

  Father said, “Have some respect for your mother, for God’s sake. What else have we but respect?”

  Mother put her spoon down and lowered her eyes to our splintery table, but Erich ranted on.

  “We’re the ones who don’t have passports. We’re the people without a homeland. We’re the ones going to the ghetto.”

  Ever the hopeless optimist, I made a feeble attempt: “The proclamation doesn’t actually use the word ghetto.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” Father said. “The meaning is clear. Go, children, see what it looks like for us there. Your mother and I need some time to make plans.”

  We were glad to break away from the heavy grief in our apartment. “Let’s take Tanya with us,” I said, knocking on her door.

  She wasn’t surprised to see us. “I heard already. Too grim for words.”

  “We’re walking over to look at the neighborhood more closely.”

  “Neighborhood?” said Tanya. “It’s more like a rabbit warren. Mama, I’ll be back in an hour,” she called over her shoulder.

  We hurried past the guards across the bridge into Hongkew and walked the perimeter of the designated area. It bordered the International Settlement to the north, down Chaufoong Road on the west, to East Seward Road on the south, and up along the eastern border of Yangtzepoo Creek. Less than a square mile—forty square blocks tangled deep in the belly of Hongkew and hidden far from the river and the brightly lit boulevards. There wasn’t even a small green square of a park to relieve the dreariness. Here, thousands of us were going to be forced to relocate our homes and businesses.

  “Imagine, all of us in less than a square mile that takes under twenty minutes to cover,” I said.

  Erich added, “Twenty minutes only because we have to elbow our way through the filthy streets.”

  The streets were clogged with rickshaws and pedicabs; with overflowing garbage bins; with men in old-fashioned black silk gowns, and still older men clicking mah-jongg tiles on makeshift tables in the lanes; with laundry dragging from lines strung between houses or from poles sticking out of windows; with carriers balancing bamboo poles on their shoulders, the pungent liquids sloshing out of buckets hanging from either end.

  “God alone knows what’s in those buckets,” Tanya said. “Could be soup, could be warm pee.”

  We stepped over people sleeping on the street, their heads nesting on gunnysacks for pillows. Of course, none of this was brand-new to us. Mother worked in Hongkew, though in the prettier Viennese section, and we’d been in and out of the district during our years in Shanghai. “How colorful it is,” I used to say. But there, deep in its core, color gave way to squalor. I eyed the drab surroundings, not as a visitor now, but as a future resident, and I simply couldn’t imagine this place as a neighborhood for people like us.

  Shaken, the best I could manage was, “Well, it’s certainly full of life.”

  “And reeking of death,” Erich added, tripping over the body of a rail-thin man in one of the lanes—maybe sleeping, maybe dead.

  “There are a few exemptions,” Tanya said. “The Mirrer Yeshiva boys, for one. I hear they’ll be allowed to stay at the synagogue on the outside. There must be other exceptions.” Her voice trailed off. “I think I’ll have to leave Moishe behind,” she said mournfully.

  Well, so there was some good news!

  Later, we dropped Tanya home, and we four Shpanns sat on Mother and Father’s bed for a conference. Lately, I’d been having headaches. Stress, Father said. Probably malnutrition.

  Everyone was despondent about the three months we’d been given to relocate—and to such awful surroundings. I didn’t want to be like the rest of them; but rubbing my forehead to stave off the shadowy vision that sometimes came with my migraines, I wondered where the chipper girl was who’d first set foot in Shanghai, ready for adventure. Where the good girl was. In a futile effort to find her again, I said brightly, “At least we won’t have to go far for groceries.”

  Erich rolled his eyes, but Mother listened to every detail. Setting her jaw squarely, she said, “I know some people in Hongkew, Mr. Schmaltzer from the bakery, others. I’ll inquire about suitable quarters.”

  “There aren’t suitable quarters,” Erich grumbled.

  “There must be,” said Father. “Thousands of people manage to live there respectably.”

  Erich slammed his fist down on the table. “That’s the problem. Too many thousands. Already about eight thousand refugees and Japanese, and a hundred thousand more Chinese who’re used to living without indoor plumbing. Without plumbing, Father.”

  Mother winced. “So thousands with plumbing will evacuate to make room for us. Surely we’ll be able to trade our apartment for a larger one.” Her statement was more like a question, and I wanted to answer, “Yes, of course,” but our stroll around the district that day had filled me with doubts. Mother said, “Tomorrow after I leave the bakery, I’ll begin looking.”

  Father patted her crooked hand. “Frieda, it is possible that we will do worse.”

  “No!” she shouted.

  But the next day’s news was more discouraging.

  “Key money we’re going to need,” Mother said. “They say as much as four months’ rent, on top of the rent. A bribe to get people out of their houses so we can move in. Where do we find money like that, I ask you, Jakob? Where?”

  “We’ll find a way.”

  I glanced over at The Violin, but Father took off his pinkie ring that had belonged to Grandfather Rudolf—his last memento of his parents. “You’ll know where to sell it, Erich?”

  I snatched it out of Erich’s hands. “I know where.” Liu had connections, and he’d only take a small fee.

  Mother set her lips in a tight line, a sure sign that she was fighting back tears. “We might all four have to crowd into one room. Not even our three tiny closets. There’s more.” We waited. “Erich was right, most of the buildings don’t have plumbing.”

  Squatting over pots? I would die of mortification.

  Father spread a map of Hongkew on the table, with our small designated area shaded in gray.

  “Looks like prison walls,” Erich mumbled.

  I kicked him under the table as Mother asked, “Jakob, when we’re in Hongkew, you will still be able to play with the chamber quartet?”

  “I cannot live without music …” Father began.

  “Music, music, music! What about money, Jakob? We depend on the miserly money you get from your concerts and a bit from Erich’s deliveries now that Mr. Schmaltzer’s cut my job back to a pittance. I have one English student left, Ludmila Mogelevsky. A fen or two. And where will you teach your students if we all live in one small room? Think, Jakob, think beyond the treble clef for a change, yes?”

  Father hung his head like a scolded child, and suddenly I realized something shocking about my father: He wasn’t a strong man, and yet all my life I’d thought he was in charge. Now the truth was clear. Mother, a wall of granite, had always fortified Father and made him appear steady and able. How frightening! What was a family with a father who couldn’t handle the unexpected, the terrifying dark that we were headed into?

  Within a day or two we learned there would be a few more exceptions. The Russian and Polish Jews who’d arrived in Shanghai by 1937 wouldn’t be sent to the ghetto. Of course, we came in 1939, so we weren’t exempt. However, some people who had documented or essential jobs outside the ghetto would temporarily be able to get passes to go to work, but no one knew how long temporary was. That meant Father might be able to continue with the chamber quartet for a while, and maybe share space with someone to teach the three or four students who could still afford violin lessons, at least for a while. Hope rose again. Erich laughed at me.

  “You’re a dreamer, my sister.”

  “Someone has to be, around here.”

  “I suppose. Come,” he said gruffly, “we’re going to enjoy the freedom of the city while we have it.”

  We walked for hours and hours
along the Bund, all through the French Concession, out into the country, into the Badlands, where the gambling houses were, and the opium dens and nightclubs, even one named Hollywood. We climbed fences and prowled around the estates of the wealthiest Jews in Shanghai—the Kadoories, the Sassoons, the Hardoons—knowing that within months they’d be forced to abandon their fancy estates, carry what they could on their backs, and march with thousands of other enemy nationals into primitive Japanese internment camps. Mean, I suppose, but it gave me a delicious lift to know that they’d lose their elegant houses and kow-towing servants, and would have to look after themselves for the first time in their lives.

  We tried to look like normal people meandering through Jessfield Park, through the countryside—not like saboteurs, not like Jews about to be shut into a choking ghetto.

  Erich reminded me of the risks around the country estates. “Listen, there are guard towers and firing squads authorized to shoot intruders at the whim of the Japanese soldiers. But if a sentry spots the two of us strolling down a country road, laughing and singing, he’ll just think we’re ga-ga young lovers and wave us on.”

  “Any moron could see that we’re brother and sister,” I snapped.

  “Ach, we all look alike to them, anyway.”

  It worked. We charmed one stern-looking guard, who stood so straight that you’d swear his shoulders were glued to the fence behind him. He apparently heard us singing a German drinking song before we poked our heads out of the woods. He barked something to us in Japanese.

  My heart held its breath as Erich whispered, “Just skip, keep singing.”

  We clasped hands and swung our arms, bowing our heads in his direction. A smile spread across his face. He stabbed his bayonet into the hard ground and pulled out a wilted picture of his sweetheart and him, seated in some sort of Ferris wheel car. She had a stick-out ponytail pulled to one side of her head, and her eyes were wide in mock fear as the two of them were ready to take off into the cloudless sky.

  He obviously loved the picture, loved the girl, jovially explaining the scene to us in Japanese. We didn’t understand a word, but we nodded and uttered oohs and ahs, which pleased him.

  All the while we memorized his uniform, the number of stripes; his boots, to assess whether they were steel-toed; the buildings behind him, the number of chimneys puffing smoke out into the late-winter air—every detail we could see or smell or hear, to report to REACT. I knew that any second he could pull out of his lovesick wallowing and turn on us. I squashed my fear down inside. Wartime, I kept reminding myself. Individuals don’t matter. I don’t matter. Families don’t matter.

  But they did.

  The guard reached toward Erich. His hands were thick, strong. For an instant I thought he might choke Erich, but then I saw that he was offering a cigarette. A peace offering, one lover to another? Erich took the gift in fingers trembling ever so slightly, as the Japanese guard reached into his pocket for a match, which he struck on his boot. The soldier jabbered and motioned something to me, the gist of it apparently being, don’t smoke; my girlfriend doesn’t smoke.

  Erich and I reviewed the abrupt turn our lives were about to take. He picked at the skin around his thumbs, which was raw and bleeding. I slapped his hands every so often to stop him.

  At Mr. Bauman’s café, Erich said, “We’ll have to lie and cheat to get passes to leave the ghetto.”

  “Oh, I’m good at that. Grete would be amazed to see how devious I’ve become.” My words were jaunty, but deep down I grieved for the good girl, the before-the-war girl. I caught the last of Erich’s sentence:

  “… a pass just to go to school.”

  I leaned toward him, covering my mouth, and whispered, “What about our REACT assignments? How will we manage?”

  “I’ll smuggle and lie and sneak and bribe my way out of the ghetto. You, my sister, will stop the work.”

  “I won’t! I can do all those things just like you can.”

  Erich studied me closely for a few seconds and took a sip of the tea we shared. Secondhand tea leaves—free at Mr. Bauman’s café. “For once in your life, listen to me, Ilse. I’m your big brother.” Why couldn’t he say, I love you? Instead, I heard, “I know what’s best for you. They’ll have guards planted at every entrance. They’re saying that our own men will be drafted as Pao Chia guards. Tell me, Ilse, how is it different from a prison?”

  “But our own men, won’t they be more lenient?”

  “Don’t count on it. You’ve heard the rumors like I have, about the camps in Germany, in Poland, with our men as kapos? Who can blame them? They do what they must to survive.”

  Yes, I’d heard. Terrible stories trickled down to us. Just rumors, we reassured ourselves. Also, we got news through REACT, which had ears in the German consulate. We knew about the horrible gassings at Chelmno and Sobibor but the rest of those places in Germany and Poland were just concentration camps, where many people were crowded together. True, some families were split up and a few people died of hunger or exposure and disease and sheer exhaustion from hard labor. This was wartime, after all, but the strong survived. We believed that our concentration in the Hongkew ghetto would be very much like what was happening in the camps of Europe, and that all we had to do was stay healthy, and we’d make it to the end of the war. “At least here in China,” we murmured to one another, “families can stay together for strength.”

  At least people still fell in love.

  “Erich, do you ever think about being in love, maybe with Tanya?”

  “Certainly not Tanya! She’s as lovable as a ball of barbed wire. Even her cat has more sex appeal.”

  “Somebody else, then. Do you ever daydream about marrying the person you adore most?”

  Erich laughed cynically. “Never. We’re too young to be in love.”

  “We are not!”

  “Anyway, love is a luxury we can’t afford, like chocolates.”

  I lowered my eyes and kept still, but I knew that love in wartime wasn’t a luxury like chocolates. It was a necessity, like bread, like breath.

  And my work for REACT would continue, as long as I drew breath.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1943

  Bored and restless after school, we needed something, anything, to do before the Hongkew gates were to slam in our faces. Mr. Bauman was kind enough to let us young people twiddle the hours away in his café without spending a fen.

  Tanya and the other girls and I looked over the crop of boys who crowded around the table across the room. We had a capsule summary for each one: “Buck-toothed.” “Looks like a rabbit.” “Ugly yellow shirt.” “Never stops talking.” “Name’s Hershel, bad name.” “So dumb in school that Miss Klein acts like she doesn’t see his hand waving in the air.” “Midget.” “He’ll be bald in a couple years.” We giggled with each pronouncement.

  And then one day Dovid came into the café, and my heart leapfrogged. Despite the spring warmth he wore a mothy tweed sweater and patched, shiny trousers. An American-style baseball cap, too small for his head, perched atop a mass of dark curls. One curl endearingly fell over his forehead. He needed a haircut; well, didn’t we all? Although he sat at the table packed with other boys three-deep, he seemed to be alone, drawing something on little scraps of paper.

  All us girls perked up at the scent of fresh blood across the room. We bunched up to compare notes. “Nice hair.” “Funny clothes.” “A melancholy artist.” “Very intense.” “Looks like he hasn’t eaten since a week ago Tuesday.”

  “But he’s a little bit cute,” Tanya said. “Ilse, you’re falling out of your chair. You know this boy?”

  “He used to be my mother’s student,” I whispered.

  “Well, he keeps looking over here. Go on, pretend you want to admire his artwork.” The other girls agreed, and Tanya shoved my chair away from the table with her sturdy legs.

  He sat at the corner of the table, outside the ring of boys. I passed him with my cup for Mr. Bauman to refill with b
oiled water. Those eyes, brown as polished wood, recaptured my heart after months of seeing them only in my memory. Slowly inching past him on the way back to my table, I noticed the little tuft of beard had given way to clean-shaven cheeks that were pinkish balls above hollows inflating and deflating like a balloon while he sketched on tiny stubs from Mr. Bauman’s cash register.

  My teacup clattered as I lowered it to the girls’ table with shaky hands.

  “Well? Well?” Tanya demanded. The girls all leaned into my circle for the report.

  “His eyelashes curl back like with mascara,” which, of course, we couldn’t get even if we’d had the money. “I can’t tell what he’s drawing.”

  “Go see,” Tanya said.

  “I can’t go back. It would look too obvious.”

  “You want to end up an old maid? Go.”

  The girls all poked and urged me on, but I shook my head.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Tanya conceded, in a bargain I was only too willing to accept.

  The next morning early, before the rowdy boys’ table filled up, I gathered my courage and scraped my chair across the café. Talk about obvious! But I was determined. “Hello, Dovid, remember me, from Mrs. Shpann’s?” He nodded and kept on sketching. “We still have your charcoal on our bookcase.” Another nod, no words. “I’d love to see what you’re drawing.”

  His smile carved a dimple in those sweet, smooth cheeks. He slid one of his drawings across the table and spun it around.

  “Amazing!” It was a tiny rendering of the café, down to the curlicues on the ornate coffee urn and the label on a small tin of sugar. “Every detail, just right.”

  Dovid slid a square of paper out of the little pile of his work and advanced it toward me, studying my face as I reached for it.

  I recognized myself, but the face looked like the me I remembered, before the sallow skin, the sunken cheeks, the thinning hair, headaches, a nose too beaked. Before starvation. “I don’t look like that anymore, Dovid.”

  He snapped it away from me and buried it in his pile.