The Last Rose of Shanghai(77)

They were outside the bakery, tying baskets on the back of the bikes, when Ernest saw two uniformed Japanese holding rifles going door-to-door across the street, searching for foreigners, asking to see their passports.

He tensed. Recently he had heard the Japanese had come across German Jews with passports stamped with J, and they had not arrested them. It was likely the Japanese wouldn’t prosecute them, since they were stateless, but if Miriam and his people were caught without passports, there was a good chance they could still be mistaken as enemy aliens.

“Act normal, no eye contact,” he warned Miriam, who was ready to bike to the Heime to deliver the bread.

This morning had started out peacefully. He had slept in the bakery for convenience and was planning on going to see Aiyi at noon. He hadn’t seen her for three days.

“What would happen if we had eye contact?” Miriam had become his reliable delivery girl. She was thriving in the bakery. She loved to help out, chatted with the workers, sang and danced with Golda as they stamped on the floor and swung the rolling pins, and smiled and joked with Sigmund. Sigmund, who had a habit of making fart jokes, was goofy and helped Miriam relax. The two had become good friends—fortunately not at the level he needed to be alarmed about.

“Then they’ll find out we’re not Chinese.” Ernest took two loaves of bread, tucked them in the basket on the bike, and covered them with an oiled paper. It was raining again, a typical summer day in Shanghai.

“I don’t think they’ll send us to the camp.” She swung onto the bike and beckoned Sigmund, who had just secured the bread on his bike. Across the street, the two soldiers hopped in a jeep and drove away; Ernest was relieved.

“You don’t know that. Just don’t talk to them, remember?” Someone called him in the bakery, so Ernest hurried to leave. He was at the door when he heard Miriam whisper something to Sigmund. “He’s a mensch, your brother,” Sigmund replied.

Miriam kicked up the kickstand. “And I’m his keeper.”

It was the most affectionate thing Ernest had ever heard from Miriam. His heart was filled with gratitude. He had given his bakery to the refugees, and the bakery had given him back his sister.



Mr. Bitker sent him one hundred sacks of flour and gave him a payment of two hundred dollars for the month’s bread, a fraction of the usual price. But Ernest was encouraged. With the flour, he could keep producing as many loaves of bread as possible, and the payment provided relief for the overtime pay he owed. But he had to be careful with the flour, since the Japanese, who’d begun to feel the pressure of food shortage, had started to confiscate flour and rice. Covertly, Ernest bought rice, coal, alcohol, kerosene, oil, and soy milk from the suppliers introduced by Mrs. Kauser and learned how to do business, how to negotiate. Always reasonable and polite, he established sound relationships with several Chinese warehouses with a connection to the black market.

By mid-June, all foreigners with means had fled Shanghai, and those without means were imprisoned or hidden. On the streets roamed the Japanese, the Germans, international criminals, spies, and gangsters. To be safe, Ernest instructed Miriam and his people to put on a tunic that many Chinese wore and warned them not to run into any soldiers.

Then one day Ernest passed Sassoon’s hotel and saw a skinny Chinese, the hotel’s bellboy, standing by a piano in the alley. “Everyone is taking things from the hotel,” he said defensively. “Do you want to buy it or not?”

It was the same piano he had played in the Jazz Bar. Aiyi would love it. Perhaps it was a sign that he should start thinking about their future, since she had mentioned children. It excited him to have a family but frightened him as well, to be a father in a dangerous time. But he was twenty-one, and he didn’t want to let her down. “How much do you want for it?”





62


AIYI


I stepped inside the teahouse. In the far corner, Sinmay sat at a table near a window, his back facing the garden, wearing a pair of round sunglasses with black rims; near his feet sat a black umbrella. He would be outraged. Another scandal. His youngest sister impregnated by a foreigner. But he was the only person who could save me.

I sat on a red wicker chair across from him, glad I was not showing. I had asked to meet him at the teahouse near the Winding Bridge in the famous Yu Garden, since teahouses were favorite spots for cultured pundits like Sinmay, who came to gossip and complain about the war since they were too afraid to carry a gun. I had frequented the Yu Garden teahouse as a child—they had my favorite sticky nine-layer chrysanthemum cakes, and I had loved the oddly shaped rocks, the goldfish in the streams, and the architecture of the buildings.

“Good afternoon, older brother,” I said.

The teahouse was not busy at this hour; only a few customers sat near the square dark-red tables, the framed lanterns hung from the rafters. An old man in a long robe was counting peanuts in a saucer, a musician was playing a two-string instrument in the corner, and a group of three young men, their heads gathered close, were plotting something at the far end.

“You haven’t come home for over three months, little sister. Are you going to come back?” Sinmay took off the black-rimmed sunglasses and placed them near a tea set with blue butterflies.

“So you can lock me up again?” I was ruining my chances, yet I couldn’t let him off easily.