by Lois Ruby
“Good. A boy with ambition. Like me, myself.”
“Yes, sir. But my brother won’t survive much longer in Ward Road. I saw him yesterday.”
“Yesterday? Yesterday you visit your Jewish mama. She like peppermint from Harrods? Very expensive.”
“Oh, yes, sir, more than you can imagine. After I left Chaipei, I went to see my brother, Erich, in Ward Road Jail. He’s skin and bones, desperately in need of a bath and some meaty, hot soup. His spirit is nearly broken. I’ve heard that typhus spreads through the jail like fire.”
“Ah, yes, typhus only in China. Dirty here. Not in Japan. Clean as a whistle in Japan.”
Nowhere, I was getting nowhere with him.
“What your brother’s name?”
I raised my head—still a chance?—and swallowed dry. “Erich Shpann, sir.”
“Erich Shpann! Ghoya not like Erich Shpann!”
I felt the color drain from my face. Erich was the one who’d found and buried Mr. Shaum after Ghoya had placed him under house arrest. Word got around in the ghetto. Ghoya remembered, and now maybe I’d condemned my own brother to death.
I sighed so deeply that my spongy lungs whistled. “May I go, sir?”
Ghoya’s arm shot out like Hitler’s, pointing to the door. I knocked for the secretary to let me out.
In my whole life I had never felt so absolutely drained of hope as I did at that moment backing out of Ghoya’s office.
I ran home to our empty apartment and buried my face in my pillow that had given up half its feathers and its linen cover years before. Hours passed. I suppose I slept, or else my daydreams were horribly vivid—all those prisoners, the dank and stench of Ward Road, Erich’s raspy voice—when I awoke to a sound like fingernails or claws scraping on our door. Was Moishe back? I opened the door, expecting to shoo the cat away—and found Erich heaped on the floor.
“Erich! Good God, how did you get here?” No answer came from the ragged lump on my doorstep. Dead? I gently pushed his eyelids up and saw faint signs of blue-eyed movement. Not dead! “Soup, you need soup. We have some on the hot plate.”
He nodded with barely a dipping of his jutted chin. I spoonfed him a little watery potato soup, tilting his head back to pour it down his throat. It gurgled in his gullet, but after three spoonfuls, his eyes widened with gratitude.
It took every ounce of my energy to drag him down to the water closet and wrangle him into a few inches of cold water in the concrete tub. His rat-gnawed clothes peeled away like dead skin. Erich crouched in the tub, and I washed him with a sliver of soap I’d hidden just for this day. I think we were both embarrassed—Mother had always stressed modesty. But what could we do?
A neighbor ran to fetch Father at the café, and he returned just in time to help me lift Erich out of the washtub. Father burned Erich’s lice-infested clothes in the tub and buried the ashes.
Back in our apartment, Erich lay curled on his mattress, wrapped in a sheet, face to the wall. How I missed Mother, who would know just what to do to bring Erich around.
Father said, “Let him be, Ilse. He needs to recover in his mind from that terrible place.”
I awakened, thinking we were in an earthquake. I yanked the curtain away that separated Erich’s bed from my own. His whole body was wracked with shivers.
“Father!”
He bolted up in his bed. “What! What!”
“Erich. Look at him.”
Father came close, fear in his distant eyes. He touched Erich’s forehead. “The boy’s burning up.”
Erich’s eyes were small black buttons crying out to us from deep within his red, swollen face. I ran for Mrs. Kawashima. One look at Erich, and her normally calm eyes blazed with fear also.
“We wash and wash him, make him cool,” she whispered. “Nothing else to do.”
I grabbed a basin and ran for water, sloshing it all the way back to our apartment. We began stroking Erich’s arms, his neck, his face, his chest, with rags soaked in cold water and some alcohol that Mrs. Kawashima had hoarded from before the war. I placed aspirins far back in his throat and forced them down with a mouthful of water.
Erich thrashed around. Father held him down while I soothed him with memories of our childhood days in Vienna. “Remember the carousel, Erich, both of us on the same zebra? And I pushed you off when I reached out to catch the brass ring? You were so mad at me! Pookie, remember Pookie? The time she climbed inside Mother’s piano? Oh, Erich! Think of peaches, how they ripped away from the pit when we bit into them. We used to see who could spit the peach pit the farthest, remember? You always won. Can you taste Mother’s peach cobbler floating in cream?” Eventually I lulled him to sleep with our memories, and Mrs. K went on washing and washing him for hours. She hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in days.
Then dark red eruptions appeared on Erich’s chest, and the diagnosis was confirmed: typhus. Jail fever.
“Carried from one person in the cell to the next by lice,” Doctor Stolz explained out in our hall. “Many do not survive, I’m afraid.”
I staggered to the wall. Never before did I truly believe that either my brother or I would die before our parents.
Doctor Stolz gently clasped my arm, checked my pulse, probed the glands in my neck, then tried to reassure Father and me. “The boy is young, otherwise sturdy, and you are good caretakers. He has slightly better than a fifty-fifty chance.”
“Those are terrible odds,” I protested, and the doctor sadly nodded.
Father didn’t like the odds any more than I did, but he said, “Pull yourself together, Daughter, for Erich’s sake.”
We composed ourselves and went back to the apartment to relieve Mrs. K.
Father said, “It’ll take a couple of weeks, Son, but you’ll be well after that, I promise you.”
What good was such an empty promise?
Erich’s fever dipped and spiked and dipped for two weeks. At its peak he ranted madly, yelling German gibberish, as though he’d gone back to baby talk, and those were the times that scared me most. I held his head and spooned rice gruel or potato soup into his mouth, or weak tea. His shoulders were sharp blades; I could count his ribs, which felt thin enough to snap like kindling. I slept for minutes at a time because I was sure that he needed me night and day.
I wasn’t even seventeen? Impossible. I felt like an old woman. My only comfort was that Dovid would not see me like this—wispy-haired, staggering on swollen feet, plagued with tremors and headaches, and all hollowed out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
1945
Suddenly one morning, Erich sat up and announced, “The fever’s broken.”
I pressed my palm to his head, his ears, his arms. Gone the hot, clammy skin.
“I’m hungry,” Erich said, surprising even himself.
“Well, aren’t we all.” I handed him a stale heel of bread I’d been saving for him, and he devoured it in seconds, licking the crumbs from his palm. He swung his legs off the mattress and tried to raise himself to a standing position.
Father rushed to his side. “Slowly, Son. You’re not ready yet.”
Erich flopped back down, sweating from the exertion. Tears of relief swelled in my eyes. He’d beaten the odds; he’d survived typhus. We’d all live to see the end of this war. Mother, too? Who knew?
After that, as Erich slowly recovered, he, Father, and I grew together, crowding one another like bulbs planted too close. Our lives gradually improved as a thin stream of foreign money reached the ghetto. Our bellies less hollow, I dared to believe the war would grind to an end soon and we could all go home. Not home, really. Enough news from Europe had seeped through the filter of the blockade to convince us that we Jews would not be returning to Austria. America was the home Erich and I allowed ourselves to dream about again.
Erich was still too weak to pedal Peaches to work, even though there was a demand for his services now that more food was reaching us in Hongkew. I’d been running his route. It was easy toting the fifty
pound sacks of rice and flour because I’d been lifting my brother all the weeks of his illness.
We lived on nearly nothing. Father no longer showed even a twinge of guilt over bringing in no money. I wondered: When the war ends, will he be able to reclaim the life he’s so carelessly shed? Will he even want to find another violin that fits him so perfectly as the one he’s given up?
And then another question plagued me: When Mother comes home, and Father begins acting like a working father again, can I give up the power I’ve inherited from them and slip back down to being the dutiful daughter? Do I even want to?
We heard that an internment camp was hit by an errant U.S. bomb, rousing Father from his lethargy long enough to cry, “My God! Is your mother all right?” Frantic for news, we urged the Russian refugees on the outside to hound all the consulates for information. Word trickled down to us in Hongkew that it was Pootung Internment Camp that was hit, not Mother’s.
So I was sick with relief, then ashamed at how low I’d sunk. I no longer cared if everyone in Pootung had been blown to bits so long as Mother’s camp was spared.
The pass system loosened a little, and we visited Mother the first of every month. We told her we were plumping up, staying dry in the June deluge, cool in the heat of July. Stoic soldiers, each of us. We didn’t tell her that Father sat for vacant hours staring at the wall, with The Violin’s absence a presence that filled the room like fog. We didn’t tell her that Erich had barely survived Ward Road Jail or about my humiliating visits to Ghoya’s office. And especially, we did not tell her that she had left a deep crater in our lives; that we walked around its rim, afraid one of us would stumble and fall, and drag the other two down to the bottom of the canyon.
She lied to us, also: Life in the camp was easy, she said. So friendly everyone was, and they all had meaningful jobs, soft beds, plenty to eat. During our July visit she shooed Father and Erich away for a moment. “Go take a walk. Someone said there is licorice at the canteen today. You love licorice, Jakob,” she said with a brittle smile. As soon as their backs were to us, she whispered, “The International Red Cross smuggled in a letter from America. Don’t tell your father yet. Michael O’Halloran is trying to arrange for me to go to the United States after the war.”
The buried anger flared, surprising me that its shallow grave in my soul was so close to the surface. “You? What about us?” I cried.
She seemed stunned by my question. “All of us, Ilse, all four. We are a family. Do you forget that? We will all go to America.”
I expected Mother’s news to fill me with joy. Well, it didn’t. Long ago, feasting on American movies and magazines, I’d thought of that country as pure heaven. The one thing I knew for sure after struggling through nearly six years of war was that no nation—not America and not even our beloved Austria—was a perfect paradise.
I sensed Erich getting more and more restless as his strength came back. One morning he left the apartment with such iron determination that I just knew where he was heading, and I followed.
When Gerhardt opened the door for him, I pushed my way in as well.
Gerhardt shouted, “You two should never have come here!”
“I have to talk to you,” Erich said.
“You’re marked, Shpann. The Japs are onto your scent, and you’re leading them right to our nest.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“What gives you the right?” He turned angry eyes to me.
“Gerhardt, leave my sister alone and listen to me for a second. You think you and Rolf and the rest of you are the liberators of the Free World with REACT’s mischief-making? Let me tell you, some of those men I knew in Ward Road Jail were deeper into this than we ever were, Gerhardt. We’re rank amateurs compared to them. Want to know what they told me?”
“No.” But he listened.
“Germany surrendered. Hitler’s defeated.”
“Why are you the only one who knows this?” Gerhardt asked with a sneer.
“Believe me, I have this from people who are in a position to know.”
“Jailbirds,” Gerhardt muttered.
“Some of them did a lot of damage before they landed in Ward Road. Major damage. They say Japan’s kept the news from us, but the fact is it’s all over for Hitler, and the Japanese can’t hold out much longer. They’re hanging by a hair,” Erich said. “They’ll fall to the Allies in a month, six weeks at the most. But before that, they’re going to come down hard on us as a last blast before it all ends.”
I watched the fight drain out of Gerhardt. He rubbed his face with both hands, dragging his lower eyelids down to show bloodshot eyes. He needed sleep, and something else was bothering him while Erich talked.
“There will be tighter ghetto restrictions, no passes, more blackouts, mock food shortages, more political prisoners, brutal tortures, shootings—”
I nudged Erich in the middle of his tirade and flashed him a signal: Look at him.
Gerhardt sank to the bottom step and hung his hands between his knees. “Word’s filtering in from Europe about the camps.”
“The concentration camps? Yeah, we know about that,” Erich said impatiently.
Gerhardt’s eyes blazed. “Extermination camps where people are gassed to death.”
“You mean at Chelmno?” I remembered Dovid talking about that years earlier.
“Chelmno was a small operation. I’m talking about death on a huge scale. Mass graves. Ovens. Ashes floating out of the chimneys.”
I grabbed Erich’s arm. “Where is this happening?”
“All over,” Gerhardt said gruffly. “Germany, Poland, the Sudetenland.”
“How many have died this way?” Erich asked.
Gerhardt stared up at the ceiling two stories above. “Maybe a hundred thousand.”
“A hundred thousand? Gerhardt, that’s just impossible,” I cried.
He turned his eyes to me, and what I read in them wasn’t the gleam from the day he’d found me under the stone bench. No, this time it was grief, shock, horror, as he said, “Some reports from the West say a million. A million Jews exterminated like vermin.”
We heard a rustling behind Gerhardt, and then a small figure materialized, still shrouded in shadows.
Madame Liang! Or at least the motorcycle girl I’d met in Hangchow. She wore a blue sash across her chest, tied in a knot at her waist. I couldn’t make out the Chinese characters on the sash.
“He’s right,” she said in her precise British English. “Far more dead than from the massacre at Nanking. A million, maybe more. Hitler had a most efficient killing machine, but he’s through. Here, the Japanese are still pawing the dirt before they simper off when the rest of the world gets word of the atrocities.”
I was swaying, reeling from shock upon shock. I braced myself on Erich’s arm and stared at the girl until she said, “Your mouth is gaping open, Margaret Loeffler. Ah, you thought I was merely a figment of your imagination. I assure you, I’m real.” As she came into the light, I saw a fresh wound across her cheek and the trek of tiny black stitches.
I stammered, “I thought you were in Hangchow.”
“You’ve never seen me in Shanghai? Think. Remember the day you visited our dear Erich at Ward Road?”
“You were a prisoner in the cell with him?”
“Me? No, I’d swallow cyanide first! I was the cackling old woman in the courtyard, the one creating the distraction with the pigeon so you could get away without betraying all of us with your blithering sentimentality.”
“It was my brother’s life!”
Erich said, “Yeah, a month ago I thought I was dead. Surprise. I woke up alive one morning, and I like breathing in and out on a regular basis. It’s habit-forming.”
“Indeed, it is,” the girl said. “We’ve all put our lives on the line for years; we’ve done courageous work. Now we’re too close to the finish to risk it all.”
A strange look passed from her to Erich. Did they have some history between them? She said,
“Now hear this, mates: Our work is through, and we’re closing up shop.”
Gerhardt’s rage seemed to be reenergized, and he jumped to his feet, pumped with adrenaline. Turning to the girl, he said, “You, of all people, you’re saying we should give up? Sit here and wait for the bombs to fall and the Yanks to lead the Japs away with their hands behind their heads? A million Jews dead in Europe, and we do nothing? That’s Shpann’s style, not mine.”
“I’m not the hero you are, Gerhardt. Neither’s my sister. We’re out of this operation.”
“Wait a minute!” I protested.
Erich clapped his hand over my mouth. “For once, Ilse, hold your tongue.”
“Good advice,” the girl said with a sardonic smile that obviously stretched and pained her wound. “Remember, I call the shots, and I say we rein in Rolf and the rest of them because in two months the war will be history, and I intend to be alive.” She put her arm around Erich’s waist and hooked her thumb into the back of his belt—a familiar gesture that obviously made him uncomfortable in front of me.
He slid away from her. “Yuming is right. We’ve got to stay out of jail. Another day at Ward Road, and I’d have been food for the rats. Is that what you want, you and Rolf and all of us dead before the war’s over?”
Gerhardt was not giving in gently. He pounded the railing, which clanged and echoed through the empty warehouse. “I say we fight until the last Jap falls. Give them something to remember us by. Make their last days in China a fiery hell.”
Erich yanked me toward him. “I’m out of it, and my sister’s out of it, starting right now, and if you had any sense, you’d listen to Yuming.” He pushed me toward the door, opening it a crack to make sure no one was watching us. I spotted Liu, who quickly rolled down the bank toward the river, out of sight. Erich looked back at Yuming, and we shut the door behind us.
Walking home, I leaned on my brother like a crutch and thought about Beehive day again. The man in the park, the heap of his broken bones. A beautiful sunset was wasted on me as I tried to imagine what a mountain of bones from a million corpses would look like.
In my dreams that night, I was smothered, crushed under an avalanche of those bloodless white bones fighting one another for breathing space.
