Rising Sun, Falling Shadow Page 5

  Finally, Chih-Nii stepped to one side and swept her arm behind her with a flourish. “Go. Go see your man,” she said to Esther, her tone as welcoming as before. “After all, wives are rarely so pleased to find their husbands inside the Comfort Home.”

  They followed Jia-Li to the end of the hallway. “What did you promise her?” Franz asked in a low voice.

  Jia-Li rolled her eyes. “Nothing. She cannot afford to lose me.”

  Ushi met them at the top of a staircase. “He will take you from here,” Jia-Li said as she turned away. “I have . . . appointments.”

  Ushi led Franz and Esther down the steps. In the basement, the guard had to stoop his head and neck to clear the low ceiling. He stopped at a door and glanced to both sides before entering.

  Franz and Esther followed Ushi into a long, narrow wine cellar that smelled vaguely of must. The guard latched the door behind them and then led them past row after row of bottles: wines, spirits and others that were too dusty for Franz to identify. He stopped at one rack and pounded his fist four times against the wooden frame, barely rattling the bottles in its shelves. Ushi rapped four more times rapidly. A moment later, four muffled knocks came in reply.

  Ushi placed his palms against the top shelf of the rack and pressed upward. The entire rack popped off the wall with a click, but not a single bottle shifted as he laid the frame on an angle against the other wall. He grabbed one of the screws that stuck out from the exposed wall and pulled. A short section of the wall slid toward them: a false front.

  Ushi pressed a finger to his lips and nodded toward the opening. Franz turned sideways and sidled through the gap, with Esther following. After they had taken a few steps, he heard Ushi slide the wall back into place behind them.

  Franz expected to step into the kind of torch-lit dungeons familiar to his imagination from the radio dramas and B movies of his youth, but instead he emerged from the short passageway into a spacious room furnished with a table, chairs and even a basic kitchenette. Two floor lamps lit the room. The staticky sound of a BBC broadcast floated softly from an upright wireless that stood in a corner. Another Chinese guard, imposing though not quite matching Ushi’s stature, stood facing the passageway. His arms were folded across his chest, his face expressionless. “You wait,” he grunted.

  Jakob whimpered in Esther’s arms. She rocked him, trying to hush her son. “Papa is coming,” she soothed.

  After a moment, a door swung open and Simon rushed out. He crossed the floor in a few eager strides and flung his arms around his wife and baby, kissing them both repeatedly.

  “I am so, so sorry, darling,” Esther murmured when he finally released her.

  “Not a reason in the world to be sorry, gorgeous.” Simon stroked her cheek. “I am so happy you came.”

  Franz took a step back, feeling like an intruder, but Simon turned to him with a grateful smile and an extended hand. “Thanks, Franz.”

  “Your gratitude is misplaced.” Franz shook his friend’s hand self-consciously. “If I had any say in the matter, none of us would be here.”

  Still beaming, Simon slipped Jakob out of Esther’s arms and held him overhead. “How about you, little fella? You wanted to come visit your tate, didn’t you?” He studied the baby thoughtfully. “He has your eyes, Essie. Lucky little guy.”

  Esther ran her hand through Simon’s hair, which had been shorn into a crewcut. She frowned as she assessed his outfit. The blue button-down shirt he wore billowed around him, and his black slacks were at least three inches too short. “I must bring you clothes.”

  “Not necessary, Essie.” Simon chuckled and plucked at his loose shirt. “We don’t get out much around here.”

  “And food?”

  “They treat us well. A lot better than we deserve. They’re risking a lot to protect us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  The guard glared at Simon and shook his head once.

  “Best if I don’t say too much,” Simon said.

  Esther nestled her head into the crook of Simon’s neck. “If only there was a way that we could all be together.”

  “Soon, Essie. Soon.”

  Franz took Jakob from Simon’s arms. The infant cried as Franz repositioned him against his shoulder, prompting a flood of memories of pacing miles with baby Hannah as she fussed away night after night with colic.

  Simon glanced at his son with concern. “Is he hungry?”

  Esther wrapped her arms around her husband and pulled him into a tight hug. “He can wait a few minutes.”

  Esther and Simon swayed silently in each other’s embrace, while Franz bounced Jakob and tried to distract him. The baby suckled on his finger for a moment and then cried even louder. Jakob’s howls were just then joined by an urgent pounding that came from down the passageway: two rapid knocks, followed by a brief pause and then two more rapid knocks.

  The guard snapped to attention. He shot up a hand to silence the others. “A raid! The Kempeitai!” he spat in a hushed tone as he launched into motion.

  Franz glanced helplessly at Simon. His friend’s face was calm but his eyes held an unfamiliar tinge of terror.

  The guard reached for the radio and flicked it off before dousing one of the lamps. When he turned back to the others, he held a hunting knife. He waved the blade at the baby. “Shut him up,” he growled in a low voice.

  Esther grabbed Jakob from Franz. She turned away, pulled at the top of her dress and fumbled with her slip. She jerked Jakob to her chest just as the guard extinguished the other lamp, throwing the room into darkness.

  Jakob’s howls died away. All Franz could hear was the sound of the baby nursing and the clipped breathing of the others in the room. He had a terrible thought that the Japanese might have secretly followed them to the Comfort Home: that would explain why they had not raided the Adlers’ home or the hospital. Did we just lead the Kempeitai to Simon’s hiding place? The fear weighed on his chest like piled bricks.

  The ceiling shook from the stomping of boots overhead. Then a muffled voice barked orders from somewhere on the side of the wine cellar. Even through the walls, there was no mistaking the Japanese inflection.

  The sound grew louder as the voice rose in pitch, exasperated. Franz expected to hear the false front scraping open at any moment. Bracing himself for another arrest, he thought with dread about his days at Bridge House. He considered storming into the passageway to confront the soldiers. Could bullets be any worse than another visit to the torture chamber?

  The seconds crawled past.

  Esther panted in fear, and Simon stroked her hair to try to calm her. The shouting on the other side of the wall only escalated.

  A single gunshot cracked through the silence. Esther gasped. Franz stiffened.

  Two or three more agonizing minutes passed. In the electrified quiet, Jakob’s suckling seemed to rise to the intensity of a jackhammer in Franz’s ears.

  More stomping came from the other side of the false front. Barely breathing, Franz listened intensely. But hard as he tried, he could not tell whether the footsteps were moving toward or away from the hiding place.

  II

  Chapter 8

  May 28, 1943, Hongkew, Shanghai

  As he surveyed the oppressive little room, Franz suppressed a sigh. The walls were blistered and the smoke-stained ceiling peeled at the corners. Even at midday, little natural light penetrated the single window. The oily stench of the neighbours’ cooking saturated the room all day long.

  Still, it was home now.

  To comply with the Japanese Proclamation concerning refugee Jews, the Adlers, including Esther and her baby, had been forced to trade homes—temporarily, they faintly hoped—with a Japanese family who lived in the heart of Hongkew. Like most of the refugee families, they fared poorly in the exchange: trading Sunny’s charming colonial-style house in Frenchtown for this dingy apartment
that lay within the borders of what the authorities referred to as the “Designated Area for Stateless Refugees,” though most Jews who lived inside spoke of it—albeit in whispers or sotto voce—as “the ghetto.”

  Franz knew his family was luckier than most. Their flat had indoor plumbing. Most of the other alleyway apartments—the unique Shanghai phenomenon known as longtangs—possessed only commodes or waste buckets, which were emptied every morning by “night soil men,” who carried away loads of human waste on bamboo poles across their shoulders.

  Until now, Sunny had never lived anywhere but her family’s home. Franz had to admire her: rather than mope or complain, she focused her energy on converting the one-bedroom flat into home. She had scavenged an old bamboo table and chairs from somewhere and patched up an abandoned couch whose springs had torn through its upholstery. She decorated the walls with Franz’s black-and-white photographs of some of Shanghai’s most iconic buildings and transformed the last of her mother’s old dresses into curtains. But she was fighting a losing battle. The flat was too small and too dismal to be much more than a functional shelter.

  Esther and Jakob slept on a mattress laid every night in the main room, while Franz and Sunny slept in the bedroom and Hannah bedded down in the shallow loft. Esther did the cooking and helped where she could, but her baby and her worry over her husband drained much of her energy.

  Esther had not seen Simon in three months—not since the evening they had huddled tensely in the Comfort Home’s basement hideaway, fearing the worst while the walls shook with the stomps and shouts of Kempeitai men. Almost an hour had passed before Ushi freed them from the hiding place. No one knew whether the Japanese had followed them to the brothel or raided it coincidentally, but Chih-Nii was apoplectic—even Sunny didn’t know the terms of the deal Jia-Li had struck with the madam so that Chih-Nii would not toss Simon out on the street. Esther and Franz had to swear on their lives to never return to the Comfort Home.

  In the months since, Jia-Li had functioned as a go-between, delivering weekly letters between Simon and Esther. Despite Simon’s upbeat tone—his letters were peppered with humorous anecdotes about living one floor below the busiest brothel in Shanghai—Esther remained convinced that the Kempeitai would soon track him down.

  Franz felt for his Esther but, of late, his daughter was monopolizing his thoughts. No one had coped better with the family’s arrival in Shanghai, four years earlier, than Hannah. She had embraced the experience of living in the exotic city and its many cultures as one great adventure. However, now her beloved Shanghai Jewish School had been forced to close, and in the past two months, her mood had plummeted. It had only worsened after their move, to the point where even Jakob’s presence no longer cheered her up.

  With those thoughts weighing on him, Franz climbed the rickety ladder to the cramped loft space. “It’s time for breakfast, Hannah-chen. The others have already left.”

  Hannah lay on her mattress with a book propped up on her chest. “I’m not hungry, Papa,” she said without even looking up. “Besides, I can’t face another bowl of that watery rice pudding.”

  “Breakfast is not a luxury, Hannah. You must eat. Do you realize how fortunate we are not to have to go hungry?”

  “Yes,” she muttered into her book. “We Jews are the most fortunate people in the world.”

  Franz exhaled slowly as he fought the temptation to react to her sarcasm with some of his own. “Among German Jews, we probably are, yes,” he said evenly instead.

  Hannah only nodded.

  “Of course, knowing it does not make our situation much easier, does it?” Franz allowed.

  “Not really, no.”

  Franz climbed over the ladder’s last rung and into the loft. He hunched forward, pressing his back against the slanted ceiling as he sidled along to the end of Hannah’s mattress. He sat down and placed a hand on his daughter’s arm. “Is it the move, Liebchen?”

  She shrugged.

  “You miss your old school, don’t you? Your British and American friends? The ones in the internment camps.”

  “I do, yes,” she said noncommittally.

  “Is there something else?” Franz squeezed her arm. “Perhaps a boy?”

  “My school, my teachers, my friends—I miss them all,” she said irritably. “But most of all I miss the way things were before.”

  “Before the Japanese came?”

  “That, too, I suppose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not important, Papa.”

  Franz frowned. “Hannah, do you mean before Sunny and I were married? Before we all moved in together?”

  Hannah shrugged again. “It’s not Sunny, really.” Her eyes fell to her book. “When we were in our old home on Avenue Joffre . . . everything was simpler.”

  Franz had never before sensed the slightest tension between Hannah and Sunny. The evidence suggested they shared a closeness that transcended a typical stepdaughter–stepmother relationship.

  Before Franz could probe further, Hannah rolled away to face the wall. “Papa, I’ll come down and eat breakfast soon. Do you mind if I rest another few minutes? I did not sleep well last night.”

  Franz stared at her back for a moment before he nodded to himself. “All right. I have to leave for the hospital now. But, please, Hannah, you must eat. Do you understand?”

  * * *

  As Franz stepped onto the ward, he was greeted by the sight of Berta draping a sheet over the man in the nearest bed. “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, dayan ha-emet,” the nursed murmured the Jewish prayer of mourning.

  Franz surprised himself by echoing the refrain. He had arrived in Shanghai a committed atheist and, like his father before him, distrusted all religions. However, over the past four years, Judaism had crept back into his life. He was still not convinced that he believed in a higher power, but he had even begun to attend Saturday Shabbat services, something he never would have dreamed of doing in Vienna.

  “So Herr Liffmann is finally gone,” Franz said as much to himself as to Berta.

  “Amazing the poor man hung on as long as he did,” Berta said.

  The typhus had ravaged the fifty-year-old cobbler’s body, and he had been no more than skin and bones in recent days. “Ja, he was a fighter,” Franz agreed with a pang of unexpectedly profound sorrow.

  Before the Japanese Proclamation, the Liffmanns had lived relatively well in the International Settlement. As the May relocation deadline drew near, Liffmann lost his job and couldn’t secure accommodation for his family inside the ghetto. Rather than move into one of the undersupplied hostels, the heime, alongside the crowds of impoverished refugees, Liffmann chose to ignore the deadline. Two days after the proclamation went into effect, the Kempeitai rounded up the Liffmanns and the others who had refused to move. The soldiers dumped the women and children at the Ward Road heim and dragged the men to Bridge House for interrogation. Those who survived the week of torture emerged from prison overwhelmed by typhus, acquired in the lice-infected prison cells. The staff at the refugee hospital tried everything, but without antibiotics or adequate intravenous fluids, it was futile. Liffmann had been the last one to survive. He never once showed a flicker of regret for his defiance. Even as he lay on his deathbed, he joked, “I fled the Nazis in Munich to Shanghai. Since I have no way of getting to the North or South Pole, I think my only other possible refuge will be a hole in the ground.”

  Franz felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Sunny. Suddenly angry, he motioned around the ward with a frustrated wave. “What is the point of all this?”

  “At least Herr Liffmann’s suffering has ended.”

  “But what do we do here anymore?” he demanded. “Who do we help?”

  “Have you forgotten that we saved Hannah’s life in that very bed?” Sunny released his elbow and pointed to the stretcher where they had
brought Franz’s daughter back from a near fatal brush with cholera the previous year. She turned her finger toward herself. “And don’t forget, you saved my life in our operating room.” Sunny had required emergency surgery, four years earlier, after being stabbed in the street by a Japanese sailor. “And what of Esther and Jakob? Where would they be without this hospital?”

  Franz waved away her arguments. “That was before, Sunny. When we still had surgical supplies. We ran out of anaesthetic weeks ago. Every day we watch people suffer and have nothing to offer aside from empty words.” He shook his head. “I am as good as useless.”

  “You’re still a doctor, Franz.”

  “No, Sunny, I’m a surgeon. That is the only kind of medicine I know.”

  “You run this hospital.” Sunny folded her arms. “Besides, look at Wen-Cheng. He cannot perform surgery either, but he still works as hard as any other doctor here.”

  Dr. Wen-Cheng Huang and Sunny had worked together at Shanghai’s Country Hospital since before the Adlers arrived in the city. Franz knew that Sunny and Wen-Cheng had once shared an attraction that could have evolved into much more, had the married surgeon been willing to leave his wife. Wen-Cheng’s wife had since died in a traffic accident, and Franz was convinced that the only reason the Chinese surgeon volunteered at the Jewish hospital was to be near Sunny. He tried to quiet his suspicions, but they had resurfaced the previous week when he stumbled upon Sunny and Wen-Cheng huddled in a corner of the ward, locked in a hushed conversation in Chinese. There was nothing uncommon about a doctor conferring with a nurse, but their reaction to his presence struck him as unusual: Sunny turning red with embarrassment, and Wen-Cheng slinking away after a few hasty words of excuse.

  Franz eyed Sunny for a long, cool moment. “Dr. Huang is a man of many talents.”