Rising Sun, Falling Shadow (2 page)

Franz took the page from her. “No, Liebchen.”

“What is it, Hannah?” Sunny asked.

“A proclamation! The Japanese have posted them all over.”

Sunny and Esther crowded in while Franz read the English words aloud: “Proclamation concerning restriction of residence and business of stateless refugees.” The hairs on his neck stood up. “Due to military necessity, places of residence and business of stateless refugees in the Shanghai area shall hereafter be restricted to the under-mentioned area.”

“They mean the German and Austrian Jews, Papa,” Hannah murmured. “Us.”

Franz locked eyes with his daughter. He considered telling her that everything was going to be fine, but he realized she would see right through the lie. All he could muster was a meek “Yes, Hannah-chen.”

The proclamation went on to declare that all stateless refugees had until the eighteenth of May to sell their homes and businesses and relocate to a narrow area within Hongkew, one of the most crowded boroughs in the city. It concluded with an ominous threat—“Persons who violate the proclamation or obstruct its reinforcement shall be liable to severe punishment”—and was signed by the military governor.

Sunny squeezed Franz's hand until her nails dug into his skin. Franz knew that she must be thinking about her parents' house—the only home she had ever known—but all she said was “Three months, Franz.”

Before he could reply, Esther's gaze darted frantically from Sunny to Franz. “A ghetto! Just like the Nazis created in Poland. Like Warsaw and Łódź.”

All the local Jews had heard horror stories of the ghettos in Eastern Europe. “Essie, you cannot jump to—”

Esther's anguished expression silenced him. “My baby . . . born in a ghetto. His father gone. Mein Gott, what next?”

 

The winter sun finally nudged through the canopy of clouds that had hovered over the city for weeks. But the brightness did little for Sunny's mood as she tromped along Ward Road beside Franz.

Reminders of Simon's absence were everywhere. At the end of the block stood the bomb-damaged schoolhouse that he had helped to transform into a functional hospital. Across the street loomed the largest of the heime, the hostels, that the CFA ran to shelter and feed the thousands of Jewish refugees who had no means of supporting themselves. Without Simon, and his magical ability to pull supplies out of thin air, what would become of all those hapless refugees? Would they starve? But Sunny was too worried for her close friend to dwell on the fate of the rest of the community.

Franz reached for Sunny's hand. “You know Simon. He always manages to land on his feet, as he likes to say.”

Not since her father, who had died four years earlier, had Sunny known anyone who could read her mind as readily as her husband. At times, she found it uncanny. “But with the baby so close.”

Franz shook his head. “To have to miss the birth of his own child.”

Sunny studied Franz, trying to discern his thoughts. She longed for a baby of her own and, while Franz seemed to share in that desire, he already had a twelve-year-old daughter. Did he really need a newborn? Besides, with their existence growing more precarious by the day, was it fair to anyone to consider it now? She had yet to feel certain enough to leave the issue to chance in the bedroom.

Franz scanned the street. “Can you imagine, Sunny? Another ten thousand of us forced to live here in Little Vienna.”

Half the city's Jewish refugees already lived in the square mile that replicated the Austrian capital right down to cafés and bakeries; according to most, it even smelled like home. The Jews shared the cramped space with a hundred thousand Chinese, who had proven remarkably tolerant of their new neighbours. “It will be tight,” Sunny said. “At least the refugee hospital is already inside the borders.”

Franz shrugged. “Perhaps that will just be one more luxury we have to forego.”

She pulled her hand free of his. “We can't give up now, of all times! The hospital is going to be needed more than ever.”

“Yes, I suppose it will.” His expression fell somewhere between apologetic and resigned.

As they approa
ched the footpath that led to the hospital, Sunny experienced a familiar sinking feeling. Involuntarily, her eyes shifted toward the abandoned building across the street. The weeks of rain had helped cleanse the walls, but she could still make out reddish-brown streaks. The slaughter of the two boys and Irma flashed to her mind so vividly that it felt as though the execution were unfolding in front of her all over again.

She had never learned what the teenagers had allegedly stolen. Summary executions were so commonplace in Shanghai that she had come to expect such violence from the Japanese. Still, her cheeks burned with shame. Never had she felt more helpless or cowardly than in the aftermath of that impromptu firing squad.

Franz gently tugged at her sleeve. “Poor Irma. So brave, but so rash. And for what? Thank God you kept your head, Sunny.”

Sunny understood that his reassurance was meant kindly, but it only exacerbated her self-disgust. She broke free of him and headed down the pathway to the hospital.

From the outside, the single-level structure looked as uninspiring as ever. Inside was a different story. Since opening in 1938, the hospital had weathered a world war and a hostile occupation without ever turning away a patient. The single open ward, with its twenty-one beds, housed anywhere from a handful of patients to a hundred at a time, as during the cholera outbreak of the previous spring. The staff consisted of nine nurses—all, aside from Sunny, middle-aged or older refugees—and seven doctors, whose specialties ranged from dermatology to psychiatry. Sometimes the staff tripped over one another in the small ward, while other times a single nurse managed the entire hospital on her own. Many lives had been saved inside the hospital, not a few of them in the operating room, where Franz and the others had performed surgeries that should have been impossible to successfully conduct in such a rudimentary facility.

In recent months, the Japanese had actually helped to supply the hospital. A year earlier, four critically injured Japanese sailors had been rushed there after the Chinese Underground had allegedly detonated a bomb at the wharf nearby. Three of the four victims survived. Ever since, the Japanese had used the refugee hospital as a backup facility for their injured and ill. Sporadically, and always unannounced, canvas-covered truck
s would rumble up to the sidewalk, and soldiers would dump crates, often marked only in Japanese, outside the doors. The supplies, a hodgepodge of bandages, non-perishable food and medications (some long past their expiry dates), rarely corresponded with the hospital's needs, but Simon and his second-in-command, Joey, managed to trade them on the black market for what was most urgently required.

As Franz and Sunny made their way down the main corridor, they slowed at an open door. Inside the office, Maxwell Feinstein ran a makeshift pathology lab. As expected, they found the sixty-year-old internist hunched over a desktop microscope, wearing his usual spotless lab coat and polka-dot bowtie. Max and his wife, Sarah, had been among the first German refugees to arrive in Shanghai as war loomed in Europe, but their daughter and her husband had refused to leave Hamburg with them. Their son-in-law had been convinced that someone he knew at the American consulate would secure them a visa to the United States. By the time he realized his mistake, the war in Europe had cut off the escape route to Shanghai. Max had not heard a word from his daughter or two grandsons in more than two years. He never spoke of them, but his grief was a persistent underlying presence.

Max wasn't alone in the office. Li Jun—“Joey” to everyone at the hospital—paced what little space he could find on the other side of Max's desk. The wiry twenty-one-year-old was dressed in his usual attire: a navy three-piece suit left to him by a patient's widow.

Though Joey rarely spoke of his past, he had once drunkenly told Sunny how he had ended up in Shanghai, at the age of twelve, after a typhoon and subsequent flood killed his family and wiped out his village. Joey had made the hundred-and-twenty-five-mile trek to Shanghai on foot. In the city, he barely escaped the life of street prostitution that so many rural girls and boys drifted into. Instead, he worked as a coolie—the lowest echelon of Shanghai labourers, who regularly worked themselves to death or died on the street from exposure in the winter and dehydration in the summer. Joey might have fallen victim to the same fate had Sir Victor Sassoon, an Iraqi Jew and the city's most influential businessman, not taken a shine to him. Impressed by the way the young rickshaw runner bartered over a fare, Sir Victor brought Joey onto his household staff, where he acquired languages as easily as he learned his other tasks. Sir Victor had hand-picked Simon to run the CFA, and the New Yorker had come to rely on Joey—who spoke Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, German, French and even a smattering of Russian. Joey, for his part, idolized Simon, treating him as a cross between a big brother and a mentor.

Joey wheeled toward Sunny. “What have they done with Mr. Simon, the Rìběn guı˘zi?” he demanded, using the common Shanghainese pejorative, meaning “Japanese devils.”

“Simon will be all right, Joey,” Sunny soothed. “He has gone to an internment camp with many other Americans.”

“You can't trust those Japanese dogs,” Joey spat in Chinese before switching to German. “What about the hospital and the heime? Who will help them now?”

Franz motioned to Joey. “We are counting on you to fill in.”

“I am no good at that stuff.” Joey flexed one of his scrawny arms. “I am only the muscle around here.”

Franz and Sunny shared a chuckle. Joey was a very able negotiator, especially with the local black marketeers.

Max viewed the others impatiently. “How is any of this funny? The hospital cannot survive without Simon.”

“It has to, Max,” Franz said with a glance toward Sunny. “We will make sure of it.”

Max grunted skeptically. “What difference does it make, anyway? You saw the proclamation. The Japanese are herding us together in a ghetto. Probably at Hitler's request. It will make it that much easier to get rid of us.”

Franz shook his head. “The Japanese had no appetite for it last year when the SS showed up with their poison gas and plans for us.”

“Only because your friend, the colonel, intervened.”

Max had a point. The High Command in Tokyo might have never interceded to stop the Nazis' plans had Franz not solicited the help of Colonel Tsutomo Kubota, a British-schooled Japanese officer who had always been sympathetic to the refugees' plight.

“And where is Colonel Kubota now to protect us?” Max continued.

Neither Franz nor Sunny had an answer. No one seemed to know where Kubota had ended up after being dispatched from Shanghai in disgrace for overstepping his professional bounds by helping the Jews.

“Besides, the war is not going so well for the Japanese,” Max said. “Perhaps this time no one will object to Hitler's plans for us. Never forget how they handled Irma and those boys.”

Sunny fought off a shudder. Franz shook his head repeatedly. “We are already at their whim,” he pointed out. “If the Japanese want to hand us over to the Nazis, they don't need to go to the trouble of relocating all of us into another section of the city.”

“It's true,” Sunny agreed. “If they planned to hand the Jews over to the Germans, it would make far more sense to round us up in camps, like they have done with the British and Americans.”

Max arched an eyebrow. “So why move us at all?”

Franz shrugged. “More living space for their own people?”

Joey waved a hand toward the window. “The harbour is so close. And the radio towers are nearby. Even the rail lines crisscross here.”

Franz snorted in laughter. “Ja, of course. Joey is right. There is no more strategic location in all of Shanghai than Hongkew.”

“So why in God's name cluster us here then?” Max asked.

“As a deterrent,” Franz said.

Max raised an eyebrow. “They are concerned about Jewish saboteurs?”

Joey gestured to the ceiling. “Allied airplanes. The bombers.”

“Are you suggesting that the Japanese plan to use us as human shields for their military installations?” Max chuckled grimly. “The fools!”

“What is so foolish about it?” Sunny asked.

Max gave her a compassionate look that he usually reserved for patients. “You dear, naive girl. When in the history of mankind has the potential loss of Jewish lives ever deterred anyone from doing anything?”

Franz sighed. “You are as cynical as they come, my friend, but you might have a point.”

Joey began pacing again. “Where have they taken Mr. Simon?”

“To Chapei,” Sunny said. “They have converted the Great China University into a prison camp for Americans.”

Joey nodded to himself. “Good. I won't have to cross the river.”

Franz put his hands on hips. “Joey, you are not thinking . . .”

Joey gaped at him as though Franz were simple-minded. “We can't leave just leave him to rot at the hands of the Rìběn guı˘zi.”

The image of the two teens crumpled at the foot of the wall flashed again into Sunny's mind. She reached out and squeezed Joey's shoulder. He reddened at her touch. She had always found his schoolboy crush endearing, but now she chose to use it strategically. “Joey, promise me you will not do anything rash,” she said softly in Shanghainese. “If something were to happen to you, I would be lost. You know that.”

Joey turned crimson, and he dropped his gaze to his feet. “I only want to go see how he is doing.”

“It's too dangerous,” Sunny said.

But Joey persisted. “Last week, I crossed the Whangpoo to the Pootung Camp to bring food to the Kaplans. That kind old British couple from the CFA executive.” He shrugged slightly. “There were only a few soldiers outside. No one stopped me from going in.”

Sunny gave his shoulder another squeeze before letting go. “Just so long as you do not try anything reckless.”

“I won't,” he mumbled.

“You must promise me—” Sunny began to insist, but a panicky voice cut her off.

“Franz!” Esther croaked from the doorway.

Sunny looked over to see Esther swaying at the threshold. Her face was ghostly pale against the collar of her black coat, and she propped herself up in the doorframe with a trembling hand.

Franz rushed over and slid his arm behind Esther's back. “What is it, Essie?”

Esther fumbled for her belly and her coat flopped open. She clutched her bulging abdomen. “The baby,” she whispered.

“Is it coming? Now?”

Esther only grimaced. Sunny's eyes were drawn to the woman's legs, where dark red blood trickled down the inside of her knee.

“When did the bleeding begin?” Sunny demanded.

“Fifteen minutes, maybe,” Esther whimpered uncharacteristically. Her expression exuded sheer panic. “It keeps coming. Clots, too. What is happening to my baby?”

Before Sunny could reply, Esther's eyes rolled back in their sockets. Her legs buckled and she collapsed in Franz's arms.