by Lois Ruby
May 12, 1944
Dear Miss Loeffler,
This is to inform you that you have been selected from among twenty-six lesser qualified young western ladies as a tutor for my granddaughter, Spring Jade.
You will kindly report to my family compound at 2 Fuming Road, Hangchow, at six o’clock Saturday of this week. My houseboy will meet your train. We are in the region of West Lake. You will find Hangchow to be a beautiful city.
I must warn you, however, that I am an exacting taskmaster. If you do not perform to my standards, you can expect to be back on a train within twenty-four hours. Others have failed before you.
Cordially yours,
MADAME LIANG
“Madame Liang is such an arrogant old witch!”
Erich signaled that we should be whispering; thin walls, he reminded me. “Don’t worry, she’ll send you right back. You won’t even get a glimpse of Spring Jade. This is all just a front for Chiang Kai-shek’s Free China Movement. Madame Liang will get the information to occupied Nanking, and from there to the Nationalist soldiers hiding out in the mountains. They have lots of American support, and in exchange, they supply information REACT can use against the Japs.”
“Well, I’m not just mad at the Japanese; I’m mad at the Americans, too,” I grumbled.
“That’s beside the point. You’ll give the suitcase to Madame Liang, then get on the next train back to Shanghai. She’ll hand you a letter firing you.”
“I’m insulted already.” I rummaged through the satchel, feeling and sniffing the beautiful clothing and shiny toys. I hadn’t seen anything so elegant and crisp-new since we’d arrived in China. Spinning the top on our rough wood floor, I watched the blue and red colors swirl dizzily. A new baby doll with stiff blond hair lay curled in a silk blanket. “Spring Jade’s too old for this doll.”
“Americans. What do they know?” Erich said.
There was some embarrassing lacy underwear that I tucked beneath the baby doll. Also a small makeup case with a wonderful fire-engine red lipstick that I smeared on my dry lips without even looking in the mirror. “Where’s the message I’m supposed to be carrying?”
“Figure it out.”
I inspected each item, including the underwear, turning each piece of clothing inside out, examining labels, looking for a secret compartment in the suitcase, in the doll. I opened every jar in the makeup case and flipped through each book. “I don’t see a thing.”
“Your vision is clouded by the headaches you get. You think I’m as blind as Mother and don’t see you wincing and squinting and covering your eyes from the light? Headaches like that, you’d never travel anywhere without a trusted remedy, would you, Ilse?”
I puzzled over his words that seemed to come out of nowhere. A clue, but what did it mean? I pawed through the suitcase again and the makeup case, and it was making me so cranky that I actually felt a headache starting to tighten around my crown. I wondered if Mother had saved me an aspirin in that vial she hid behind the alarm clock. But here in the makeup case was a small brown bottle filled with cotton batting and—aspirin!
Erich nodded.
“Why, you clever boys, you!” With all the pills emptied out on the table, I held the bottle up to the light to read the back of the label. Through the prism of brown glass, nothing was visible but solid black lines. “This can’t be it.”
“Practically microscopic,” Erich said. “Also encrypted. However, Madame Liang will be able to read and decipher a vast amount of information which you and I can’t read, and shouldn’t know anyway, about the locations of supply depots, munitions warehouses, radio transmitters, storage areas for synthetic fuel—that kind of stuff.”
“All that on the back of an aspirin label?”
Erich plinked the pills back into the vial and kissed the glass with a theatrical flourish. “This you protect with your life. The most important information, at least hitting us directly, is about the location of political prisoners. If the Americans know how many political prisoners are here in Hongkew and how densely populated our area is, maybe they won’t bomb us.”
Bomb us? That had never occurred to me.
“So you see the importance of your assignment?”
I carefully packed everything back in the suitcase—except half the aspirin tablets, which I shook out of the brown bottle again and dropped into Mother’s hidden stash. I snapped the suitcase shut. “Yes. REACT can count on me,” I promised with a sickly excitement rising in my chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1944
Erich carried my suitcase as far as the Hongkew gate. For the sake of anyone who might be observing us, he said (lots louder than he needed to), “I doubt if you’ll make much of a tutor, but at least Hangchow’s a nice city to visit. Have a good trip.” He stepped closer and gave me a brotherly kiss on the forehead, colliding with my hat. Under its wide shade he whispered, “Be careful. Don’t trust anybody. Come back safely.”
I wanted a simple declaration such as, “I love you, my sister.” His eyes said what I wanted to hear, at least that’s what I read in his worried expression as he gently pushed me toward the Hongkew gate.
I showed my yellow-striped Ilse Shpann pass to the Pao Chia guard, careful to keep my Margaret Loeffler passport tucked into my purse. I hailed a rickshaw boy, who tossed my suitcase in at my feet. As he was lifting the shafts of the rickshaw, I looked back at my brother behind the bars and barbed wire, and prayed that I’d do everything just right on this mission and be home with my family by dark.
Not easy buying the ticket at the train station. Slipping my money under the window, I shouted, “Hangchow.” The Chinese man in the ticket cage clicked his abacus anxiously while a Japanese guard grunted orders. The guard asked to see my passport and moved his dark-dot eyes back and forth half a dozen times from my face to the picture. He was suspicious, probably because it just wasn’t common for western girls to travel, much less alone.
“Purpose of trip?” he demanded.
I explained, but he couldn’t understand either my German or my English. My hands shook as I smoothed Madame Liang’s letter under the window. “Don’t trust anybody.” What if he kept it? He and the timid ticket seller discussed the English letter, half in Chinese, half in Japanese. Then the guard demanded to see what was in my suitcase, but there was nowhere to set it down. Standing on one foot like a flamingo, I hoisted my other leg up as a shelf, but human beings aren’t meant to totter on one leg. The suitcase wobbled as I offered up various items for the guard’s inspection. We never got to the underwear. I’d have been mortified if we had. And he never asked me to open the flowered makeup case.
A long line formed behind me, with people looking over my shoulder to see what the delay was, or to see what foreign treasures I harbored in my suitcase. Eventually the guard appeared to be satisfied and passed Madame Liang’s letter back to me, so the ticket man was free to snap up my money. His fingers flew on the abacus, and he slid my change and my ticket back under the window. Completely frazzled, I ran to the tracks.
The conductor folded his arms across his chest and shook his head, refusing to let me on the train. We argued in our two languages. I had no idea what was happening, since I’d never ridden a Chinese train before. Maybe he was telling me that foreigners were supposed to ride in a different compartment. I started to run to the next entrance, my suitcase banging against my thigh; but he followed me, blowing his whistle and shouting something in high-pitched Chinese. He barred the next entrance. The train whistle was already blowing, and then I realized what the situation was—he expected a bribe! I dug two coins out of my purse, and like magic, a step stool came down and the entrance was no longer blocked.
I climbed aboard as the train began chugging out of the station, and I sank into the last seat in the last row, with my suitcase on my lap. My new shoes stuck to the floor, glued with God knows what. There were as many birds on that train as people, some caged, some not. Some of the people should have been. My inform
al survey during the first few minutes of the trip was that 50 percent of all Chinese train travelers smoked, and the other 50 percent batted away the dense cloud of smoke so they could see the cans to spit their tobacco into. Some just spit on the floor. Shuddering, I slid the suitcase under my seat anyway.
I assured myself that the smoke and flying tobacco wouldn’t reach me there in the back row. The window slid down only three inches, just enough to let a black tornado of coal exhaust billow into the car until I had to shut my window or else swallow mouthfuls of the stuff, which was like liquid tar. A Chinese train in May is very hot, especially with the window closed, and I had 252 kilometers to cover and stupidly hadn’t remembered to bring a Thermos of water.
I felt very white and foreign and schoolmarmish in my pert suit and straw hat. The other passengers and birds ogled me with curiosity. One woman offered to sell me a cigarette stub; another wanted me to make an offer on a half-dead goose. Two men asked to use my suitcase as a makeshift mah-jongg table. I was pretty good at deciphering Chinese by then, but I pretended not to understand the request. What if these men were spies, or thieves, or just careless travelers? What if they got off at any of the dozens of stops and took the suitcase with them? I pictured running after them, holding my hat on my head, yelling, “Hey, that’s mine!” What if I never got it back before the train took off again? I’d have no idea where I was. I could be lost for days, plus I’d have to suffer Erich’s disappointment and the wrath of Gerhardt and Rolf and Madame Liang.
So I kicked the suitcase farther under my seat and opened a book that the Underground had supplied me with for Spring Jade’s enlightenment. It was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, who was an exile like me. Thick and satisfying, bound in fragrant leather, the book took me out of the chaos of a Chinese hard-seat train into a serene sanatorium in Germany, before the war.
The train rumbled along, and I was swimming in the beautiful German words of Thomas Mann when suddenly a line from Madame Liang’s letter flashed through my mind: “Others have failed before you.” I’d thought that meant other tutors for the imagined Spring Jade, but now I saw a darker meaning. The warning sent shivers through me despite the stifling train and the press of steamy bodies all around me. And the birds with unflinching stares.
Others carrying information had failed before me. Where were they now? Dead or alive? I thought of the huge man in the park on Beehive day—and his heap of broken bones outside Bridge House. I glanced around at the riders parading up and down the aisle, trading seats for no apparent reason, spitting seeds on the floor, squatting at the back of the car the way Chinese do for hours at a time.
Terror began seeping into my toes and slowly crept up my legs, up my chest, until my neck was hot and a steel band tightened around my head. Pounding, pounding, in counter-rhythm to the clacking of steel wheels on the track. My heart ticked like an overwound clock.
Relief. Get the aspirin before my head, before my heart explodes. Everyone on the train’s watching me. My head’s throbbing enough that all of them can see it expand and contract like a balloon. Just waiting for me to pop! Then they’ll come and take everything. I will shatter, a hundred kilometers away from my family, and nothing of me will be left to identify.
Aspirin. I had to get to the aspirin before I burst. But the bottle was buried in my suitcase, far back under my seat, stuck to the floor, miles away, out of reach. I’d have to get down on the floor, tacky with spittle and stringy wet tobacco, to slide the valise out.
They’ll all see me, even the blind man across the aisle. They’ll watch me hunt for the aspirin bottle, jumble with the cap. They’ll know what I’m hiding. They’ll snatch the bottle out of my hand. They’ll read the back of the label. The band’s tightening around my head … I’m choking … can’t move … can’t breathe …
A Chinese amah came over to me and pressed a cool, wet rag to my forehead. She spoke soothing words in a dialect I’d never heard, then switched to Mandarin and said, “Foreigners, they breathe shallow; watch me.” She pressed my hand to her stomach to show me the Chinese way to breathe. “Now you.” My chest rose, and cool air flowed all the way down to my toes.
In a few minutes the amah saw that my panic had subsided. She patted my arm, took back her dirty rag, rejoined the noisy travelers at the front of the car, and left me alone. My heart slowly shrank and nested back in my chest, and an odd calm flooded me.
Two hours passed, and the train slowed down for the Hangchow station. Getting off, I waved to the amah through the window, but she’d apparently forgotten about me and didn’t wave back.
No one was there at the station to meet me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
1944
As the rush of people off the train cleared, I plunked myself down on a hard, bone-smooth bench. Tears filled my eyes.
Well, that’ll get you nowhere.
I propped my feet up on the suitcase to wait for Madame Liang’s houseboy. Lots of people bustled in, bought tickets, left, and while everyone gazed at me as though I’d sprouted a second head, nobody seemed to be looking for a lone western schoolmarm.
I kicked my suitcase across the floor to the ticket window. “Fuming Road?” I said. No sign of recognition. Knowing it was futile, I still had to ask, “Madame Liang?” The ticket man rattled something off in the local dialect. I scrolled through my limited Chinese vocabulary and retrieved the words that I thought meant, “Where is West Lake?” “Xihu zai nar?” I repeated.
“Ah, ah!” He came out of the ticket cage and shuffled to a map on the wall, encased in glass smudged with fingerprints. He pointed to this blue thing in the center of the map. West Lake. I could walk there from the train station, but the lake was huge, like a small sea. I might wander around it for hours, lugging my suitcase, with no idea where I was going.
“Xie xie, thank you,” I said. Defeated, I went back to the bench with my suitcase footstool. The clock dragged slowly.
A welcome cross-breeze rippled through the station, and so I sat and waited, not even sure what I was waiting for, reviewing and polishing every detail of this trip. Sometime in the future, when the war is long past, I promised myself, my children will be begging me to tell this story again and again. We’ll be sitting in the kitchen of our bungalow in Santa Rosa, California, America, right down the road from Mother’s friend, Molly O’Toole. Over bowls of chocolate ice cream—or peach, in honor of Uncle Erich and Aunt Whoever—I’ll tell them about my adventure in Hangchow. If I survive it.
When had I turned the corner from when to if?
After an hour of this daydreaming, a man rattled a wobbly-wheeled cart into the station with a few snacks to sell, mostly fresh fruit, which was out of the question, of course, since they were no doubt fertilized with human night soil. I bought a cup of water, asking him over and over if the water had been boiled and therefore fit to drink. He didn’t understand me, but he kept nodding yes, and in the end I took the chance. Malaria, dysentery, elephantiasis—who cared? I could die of thirst before one of those diseases set in.
I was nearly two hundred pages into The Magic Mountain, dozing off and on, when I heard a resounding crash. I dropped the book on the bench, grabbed the suitcase, and plodded outside to explore.
A slender Chinese girl brushed off her motorcycle, which had apparently just collided with a wheelbarrow loaded with rice sacks. Both she and the wheelbarrow man were hopping mad. His fists were flying, and she shouted curses at him and kicked the rice sacks with her rubber sandals until one burst and a grayish stream of rice poured onto the ground.
Wasted rice when so many of us were hungry! I ducked under the flying fists and kicking legs and stuck my finger in the hole to stanch the bleeding. The girl and the man must have thought me very clever. They stopped fighting to admire western ingenuity. The man smiled as though I’d just performed a miracle that inspired him to shift the bag so that the weight resettled and the hole was just an eye staring up at the sky. With deft hands the two of them scooped up ev
ery grain of rice and tied them in the man’s oily kerchief. Grinning and bowing, he lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow and rattled down the road, with the girl shading her eyes to watch his progress.
As soon as he was out of earshot, she turned to me and said, “Looking for someone? I believe you’ve brought western clothing and makeup and books for Spring Jade, my granddaughter?”
My mouth gaped open; I was stunned by her perfect British English and her age, just two or three years older than me. She couldn’t have a granddaughter!
She motioned for me to hand the suitcase over. I lifted it, but then I had an impulse to run as fast as my legs would carry me, along with the suitcase. This girl could be a counterintelligence spy. Maybe she’d captured the real Madame Liang and tortured her to find out about me.
Ridiculous! Yet, she wasn’t at all what I had expected, which was a rich, manicured lady five times my age, dressed according to the latest French fashion. Not that I had any idea what the latest French fashion was. But it definitely wasn’t this girl, with her hair chopped blunt across her jawline, wearing western trousers and a man’s plaid cotton shirt tied at the waist.
She waggled her hand in a give-it-over-now gesture, one foot on the kickstand of her motorcycle.
“How do I know you’re the right person?” I stammered.
“Come now. Who else would meet you here, Margaret Loeffler?” She flashed an envelope before my eyes and tucked it into the ribbon band of my hat. I recognized the same creamy stationery and thick black ink. Still, she could have stolen it from the real Madame Liang, who was probably tied up and struggling to keep her head above ditch water. Which could be my fate if I weren’t careful. I remembered Erich’s warning, “never trust anybody,” and I didn’t know what to do, and anyway, if the girl had a mind to, she could just race off on her motorcycle, dragging me behind her, still stupidly clutching the suitcase in both arms.
