Rising Sun, Falling Shadow Page 6

Sunny held Franz’s gaze. “You are just as capable, Franz. We all have to adapt. There is no choice.”

  Franz opened his mouth, but a sudden commotion stopped him before he could speak. Two men were approaching them, both wearing drab grey suits. One man was dragging the other along, propping him up with an arm around his companion’s waist. The man on the verge of collapse was Chinese; the other, who had long, unruly hair and an uneven beard, looked European.

  Franz gawked at the bearded man as though seeing an apparition.

  “My God, Franz, are you a sight for sore eyes!” Ernst Muhler cried.

  “Ernst! How is this possible?” Franz said in surprise.

  He had not seen or heard from his friend in over a year—not since the painter and his lover, a Chinese man named Shan, had escaped Shanghai, with the Kempeitai in full pursuit. The authorities had discovered a series of oils Ernst had painted based on reports of the massacre in Nanking. One painting in particular still haunted Franz: a woman impaled on a Japanese standard, naked from the waist down, staring plaintively out from the canvas as the life seemingly drained from her. The paintings had so enraged and embarrassed the Japanese that execution would have been a mercy had Ernst been captured. He and Shan had fled west, to Free China, in search of the mountain villages where the Communist Resistance congregated, but Franz had no reason to believe that they had reached their destination or survived the journey.

  A hundred questions ran through Franz’s head, but the condition of Ernst’s companion was his immediate concern. Franz slid a hand behind the man’s back. Together with Ernst, he shuffled him to a nearby vacant stretcher. The man was too weak to climb onto the bed, so Franz and Ernst had to hoist him. As his fingers brushed over the man’s sweaty brow, Franz instantly recognized a high fever.

  “Thank you,” the man gasped in English as his head flopped back on the mattress.

  Sunny hurried over to join them at the bedside.

  “Look at you, Soon Yi!” Ernst exclaimed. “What a delicious vision you are.”

  Sunny gave him a quick smile but kept focused on the ill man. “Where is the infection?” she demanded.

  Ernst pointed to the man’s right leg, and Franz saw that the material covering it was stained black from blood. Sunny gently rolled up the pant leg to reveal an angry, glistening wound. The man winced but said nothing as she continued to expose more of his leg.

  Ernst flicked a finger in the direction of his companion’s shoulder. “If that’s not damage enough, my unfortunate friend here took a bullet to his arm, too.”

  “That is nothing,” the man murmured, his eyes still closed.

  Franz hunched forward to inspect the injured leg. Ignoring the putrid stench, he saw that the thigh just above the knee bulged from a large abscess. He almost missed the bullet’s entry point because it had nearly swollen shut. As he prodded the skin lightly, his fingers met with resistance. “The bullet is still lodged in your thigh, correct?” Franz asked, and the man nodded. “We will have to remove it and drain the pus.”

  “Of course, doctor,” he breathed.

  Ernst sighed. “We didn’t travel over a hundred miles and cross enemy lines simply for hospital food. Although, at this point, I wouldn’t pass up a meal of any kind.”

  “We will feed you both soon, Ernst.” Franz turned back to the other man. “What is your name?”

  “Chun.” The man finally opened his eyes. An arresting almond brown, they showed a glimmer of amusement. “Or Charlie, as Ernst insists on calling me.”

  “Ernst has not yet managed to rename me. I am Dr. Adler. Franz.”

  “While here, I actually prefer Charlie.”

  Franz didn’t understand the distinction, nor did he dwell on it. “May I examine your shoulder, Charlie?”

  Sunny helped Charlie remove his jacket and shirt. The exit wound near his shoulder was even larger than the entry wound through the deltoid muscle, but the large-calibre bullet had clearly missed any vital structures. The wound looked clean and uninfected.

  “Your shoulder will not require surgery,” Franz said. “But we must operate on your leg immediately. It cannot wait.”

  “I understand,” Charlie said.

  “Unfortunately, our hospital has all but run out of ether.” Franz looked away. “We do not have enough anaesthetic, do you understand?”

  Charlie mustered a brave smile. “It will not be pleasant, I realize, doctor. Nor will it be my first operation without anaesthetic.”

  Franz glanced at the swollen leg again, wondering if gangrene had already set in. “I cannot promise that we will be able to save the leg.”

  Charlie closed his eyes again. He nodded once. “What has to be done has to be done.”

  Two nurses arrived at the bedside. As they prepared Charlie for the operating room, Franz and Sunny led Ernst to the small staff room. Once inside, Sunny threw her arms around their friend and hugged him fiercely. Franz clapped the artist’s shoulder, feeling only bone. Above the tawny beard, grey in patches, his cheeks had hollowed but, despite his scrawniness, Ernst somehow still looked robust. His once-pale complexion had become ruddier, and his eyes burned as brightly as ever.

  “Not a word in over a year,” Franz said. “I had assumed the worst, my friend.”

  “And who says you weren’t right to?” Ernst said. “Have you ever spent a year of your life in a backwater Chinese village? Trust me. It doesn’t get much worse.”

  “You are home now,” Sunny pointed out.

  “Home? I have no idea where that is.” Ernst smiled. “But, by God, of all my deprivations from civilization, what I miss most is a little gossip.” He looked pointedly at Franz and Sunny. “So tell me. What of you two?”

  Sunny raised her left hand to show Ernst the wedding band that had once belonged to Esther’s grandmother. Ernst clutched his chest theatrically. “I knew it! You see—love can still prevail, even in this godforsaken place.”

  “Speaking of love,” Sunny said. “Where is Shan?”

  “Still in the village,” Ernst said. “He had a bad fall—sometimes we’re forced to travel in the darkness. He broke his ankle.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “He will recover.” Ernst looked away. “I left without telling him. Shan would have insisted on trying to come with us, but his injury was too serious.”

  Sunny touched Ernst’s cheek. “You were only protecting him.”

  “To be truthful, I was protecting myself. It was hard enough getting Charlie here on that game leg of his. I have come to appreciate that, behind enemy lines, two legs are a decided advantage.” He breathed out with a sigh. “Sadly for me, my Shan is not always the forgiving kind.”

  Franz eyed the artist. “Who is Charlie?”

  “A trusted friend,” Ernst said flatly, suddenly serious.

  “He looks familiar,” Sunny said. “His English is so good, but he’s not from Shanghai, is he? His accent . . .”

  Ernst ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair. “Trust me. The less you both know about Charlie, the better.”

  “But you brought him here,” Franz said. “To our hospital.”

  “I didn’t want to. Believe me, I had no choice.” Ernst shook his head helplessly. “I would make the world’s absolute worst doctor, but even I could see that Charlie would die if we left him in that village. I could think of nowhere else to turn.”

  “You were right to bring him here,” Sunny said.

  Franz nodded. “We might be able to save his leg yet.”

  “It’s always the same with us, isn’t it?” A pained smile crossed Ernst’s face. “You help me, and I repay the kindness by endangering you even further.”

  “And in spite of that, we still missed you.”

  “Of course you did,” Ernst said with exaggerated panache. “Parasite or not, my appeal is irresistible.”

 
“Will you stay?” Sunny asked.

  “Only until Charlie is well enough to travel again.”

  “That will be a long while,” Franz said. “Meantime, isn’t it terribly dangerous for you to be in Shanghai?”

  Ernst waved the suggestion away. “Sexual peccadilloes aside, I am a German gentile. A purebred Aryan. I could not be more welcome here. The Japanese adore us.”

  “They certainly do not adore you.”

  “They will never recognize me.”

  “And if they do?”

  The levity drained from Ernst’s face. “I will tell you this, my friends. We will have far bigger problems if they recognize Charlie.”

  Chapter 9

  There were no soldiers, guard dogs or barbed wire, not even a fence. Aside from a simple checkpoint posted at the intersection with Muirhead Road, Wayside Road appeared no different than it had before the proclamation had established the Jewish ghetto. It would have been easy to step off the curb and amble across the road, but Hannah wasn’t that reckless. The Japanese had set a brutal precedent the week before when it came to dealing with those who ventured out of the ghetto without passes, as three hapless young men who had simply been following their boss’s order to go to Frenchtown to buy flour for his bakery had discovered.

  Hannah had not seen the public flogging, but two neighbourhood boys had snuck out to the busy intersection to watch it. The next day, Hannah had joined a cluster of kids outside the Kadoorie School to hear the boys’ account. Revelling in their moment of celebrity, they spoke over each other as they competed to share lurid details. Apparently, two of the three bakers had sobbed openly by the third lash. One of the men fainted with the seventh stroke but, as the boys exclaimed, “not before pissing himself!” Each prisoner received fifteen lashes in all before being dumped in a twitching heap in the middle of the road. The boys agreed on one point: the snap of the whip as it struck the men’s backs sounded louder than gunfire.

  Hannah assumed that the boys had been exaggerating, but her chest still drummed as she neared the checkpoint. An elderly balding refugee manned the post, his official status signalled by the yellow rag tied around the sleeve of his suit. Lean and stooped, he resembled a schoolteacher far more than a policeman. But Hannah found little reassurance in his paternal smile. She had heard that the refugee guards were often spied upon. They had no choice but to report irregularities to the Japanese soldiers they answered to.

  Since she was under eighteen, Hannah did not require a pass to leave the ghetto. However, she had not told her father that she was planning to leave, let alone that she was smuggling contraband. The brooch jabbed into the skin below her waistband, as though deliberately reminding her of the risk that she was taking. She imagined that she must look as obvious as one of those Hollywood gangsters with a gun bulging beneath his jacket.

  Fighting back her anxiety, Hannah approached the checkpoint. She had given her word to Freddy and was determined not to break it. She could still picture his lopsided grin as he playfully punched her shoulder. “I just knew you were a brave soul,” Fritsch Herzberg, known by everyone at school as Freddy, had announced earlier that morning.

  “Not so brave.” Hannah caught herself chewing her lower lip. “They will not search me, will they?”

  “No one will touch you.” Freddy’s deep voice cracked, as sometimes it still did. Freddy was German, but he preferred to speak English and, at times, his deportment struck Hannah as pure American, right down to his self-chosen moniker. “I wish I could carry it myself, but the guards are on the lookout for my family.” Freddy shrugged helplessly. “Last week they caught Papa trying to sell one of my mother’s necklaces. He spent three days in lock-up. None of us is allowed to set foot outside the ghetto now.”

  Hannah swallowed, feeling her mettle slip a notch. “They caught your father?”

  “Only when he got to Frenchtown. They didn’t search him at the checkpoint or anything. They never do, Hannah. You will be fine.”

  “How did they catch him?”

  “He was trying to pawn the necklace off to a jeweller in the International Settlement.” Freddy tapped his temple with a forefinger. “We think the owner ratted him out. Probably had a deal with the Japs to split the profits after confiscating it.”

  Hannah’s expression must have betrayed her nervousness, because Freddy reached out and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Hannah, you only need to get the brooch to Papa’s contact in Frenchtown. He will take care of it from there.” He smiled broadly and winked. “You will do well. Guarantee you.”

  Hannah nodded, distracted by the pressure of his hand on her arm.

  Freddy was the only the boy in her class who ever touched her. He did so often—clapping her arm, mussing her hair and even draping an arm affectionately over her shoulder—and without a trace of self-consciousness. At first, Hannah had shrunk from the contact, afraid he would detect the extent to which cerebral palsy had withered her left arm, the one she always hid beneath a long sleeve. But he seemed oblivious to the asymmetry of her limbs, and after a while she came to look forward to his touch.

  Hannah had known Freddy for years and, like most of the girls at the Shanghai Jewish School, had long idolized him from afar. Although he was more than a year older and a class ahead of her, after the proclamation they had wound up being seated side by side in the classroom at the Kadoorie School, where they had been transferred. Despite her shyness, Freddy had been friendly toward her from the first day. They soon discovered a shared fascination for the local culture. Unlike Hannah, Freddy couldn’t speak Shanghainese or Mandarin, but they amused one another by chatting in pidgin English, the city’s unofficial language of commerce. Sometimes they would hold entire conversations with local merchants in pidgin, fighting back giggles. “My no savvy. This price b’long true?” Freddy would cry in mock outrage. And, if the laughter had not already given him away, he would always decline the peddler’s persistent sales pitch with a curt, “No puttee book. No can do.”

  Hannah had convinced herself that Freddy saw beyond her handicap. She dreamed of sharing a kiss with him like the one she had once secretly witnessed between two older students behind the school. But that fantasy collapsed the day she spotted Freddy strolling along Ward Road hand in hand with Leah Wasselmann. Hannah maintained their friendship as though nothing had changed, but a gloom descended over her that even she recognized as being out of proportion to the pain of an unrequited crush. She had faced far worse in her short life—hunger, homelessness and cholera—and had always made it through with her spirits intact. But in the weeks since she spied Freddy and Leah together, her curiosity and enthusiasm for life seemed to seep away, and she felt helpless to stop it. Nor could she shake her fear that she would always be an outcast: a freak who would never find love.

  She was grouchy all the time, too. Hannah felt guilty for her constant irritability, which more often than not ended up directed toward her father. When he confronted her about her mood, Hannah had allowed him to assume Sunny was to blame only because she could think of no other excuse. She was too embarrassed to set the record straight, and felt even more ashamed for it.

  Hannah had never before hidden anything from her father but, as she approached the checkpoint with Freddy’s brooch poking into her hip, she realized that lying to him was becoming habitual.

  “Guten Tag, Fräulein,” the guard said, bowing his shiny head. In the long tradition of the Chinese neighbourhood watch, or pao-chia, the men guarding the checkpoint had been selected from local volunteers. Hannah had heard that positions in the pao-chia were coveted among the refugee men because they came with a small food ration and preferential access to exit passes.

  Uncertain how to respond, Hannah returned the bow.

  The man clasped his hands together. “Of course, a lady of your tender years needs no pass to leave the Designated Area. I am, however, obligated to ask the purpose of your
excursion.”

  “I have a friend, Natasha—Natasha is Russian—she lives in Frenchtown,” Hannah sputtered. Her tongue felt thick and her words unnatural.

  The guard’s eyes narrowed. “And you think this is a wise trip to undertake?”

  For a panicked moment, Hannah assumed that he suspected her real motive. She just gaped at him, unable to find her voice.

  “To be going alone to the French Concession?” The guard glanced to either side before lowering his voice. “Shanghai is no longer the same. Soldiers and other . . . types . . . roaming the streets.” He shook his head grimly. “For a girl of your age . . .”

  Hannah steeled herself with a deep breath. “Thank you, sir, for your concern. I lived in that neighbourhood before the proclamation. I know it well. I will be fine.”

  The guard sighed and then nodded reluctantly. “You do understand that you must return to the ghet—” he coughed—“the Designated Area before eight o’clock. Believe me, Fräulein, you must not miss the curfew.”

  Before Hannah could reply, someone yelled in German behind them. “Stop! Stop this very instant!” It was a man’s voice, high-pitched and bearing a Japanese accent.

  Hannah glanced over her shoulder to see a Japanese man in a trench coat, flanked by two soldiers, trotting toward them. The man was at least a head shorter than either of his escorts, and he wore a brown fedora that looked as out of place on him as a cowboy hat.

  Ignoring Hannah altogether, the little man strode up to the refugee guard, stopping only inches from him. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The guard lowered his head deferentially. “I do not understand, sir.”

  “This.” He jabbed his thumb behind him to indicate Hannah. “I did not see you check any papers from the girl.”

  “No, Mr. Ghoya. I was told that minors do not require papers.”

  “Bah! And how do you know she is a minor? Did you see her identification?”

  “No, sir. It is clear—”

  Without warning, the little man reached up and slapped the guard’s cheek hard enough to swivel his head to the side. “It is never clear without proof! You always need to check! I told all of you this myself!”