Rising Sun, Falling Shadow (5 page)

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.

 

 

 

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.”

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?”