I burst into tears. I could hear her soft cries, and I could see her wrapped in a bundle, staring at me with Ernest’s eyes. “Let’s go, Little Star. Let’s go home.”
“Why are you crying, Aunt?”
“I’m scared.”
“Why?”
The child I didn’t have a chance to hold. Had I kept her, I would have grown to love her, protect her, feed her just like Little Star. Where was she?
Before dawn, the hour safest for a single woman to walk on the streets, I walked to the train station in the northwest to see the price of the train tickets to the Jiangsu province, where Peiyu was with her family. No matter how much it cost, I wouldn’t be able to afford it, but once I knew the price, I could start to save. But the train had stopped operating, I saw. The Japanese had recently bombed the train tracks.
I was heartbroken. I had given away my daughter, thought little of her, and now I wanted her back and I couldn’t find her.
When I returned home, I passed a cinema in the Settlement. The front doors were closed and defaced, and the posters on the walls were torn to dusty tatters. But I could still make out the image: Marlene Dietrich with golden curls in Shanghai Express and one of the stars of Gone with the Wind. Gable, whose arms used to embrace Leigh, looked forlornly at a space of empty plaster on the wall.
I’d still care for you if you married a hundred times, Ernest had said.
Tears welled in my eyes. We hadn’t had a chance to watch the movie after all. You shouldn’t have said that, Ernest. It was bad luck; I told you not to say that.
I still wanted to watch that movie, and he was the only one who could understand how much it meant to me. Would he wish to see his daughter too? When he saw me last time, he’d showed no hatred, no accusation, only regret and love.
Perhaps I should find him; perhaps he would help me find our daughter.
Before me, the sun was rising, a salted egg with gray shells. The pale rays swept the smoke-painted roofs and stretched a long feathery arm through the dusty air; the wind was rising, fresh without last night’s scent, and it dipped low and brushed my cheeks like a loving hand. I heard a newborn’s cries, a beautiful piece of music, faint, lingering, and in my mind, I saw Ernest’s face, polished, glinting through the fog like the eye of the sunrise.
83
ERNEST
Mr. Schmidt died.
A special permission, given by the Japanese authority, was granted to the grieving stateless people so they could leave the designated area and travel to the graveyard. Ernest, Golda, Sigmund, and others climbed into a bus.
Ernest sat by the window, shivering; his fever had gotten worse, and his head was pounding in agony. It was August, the weather mild, but he felt chilled, despondent, and possessed by an uncanny prescience that they would all end up dead. Mr. Schmidt’s favorite phrase came to him, unbidden. We are the lotus flowers in a pond, a shallow bloom.
The bus crossed the Garden Bridge, dropped into a ditch with black water, groaned, dragged itself out, and went on and on. Finally, it stopped at a patch of burial ground near an endless field of black, barren rice paddy. It was hard to tell whether this was a public cemetery or an unknown town at the outskirts, and Ernest was certain once they left, locating the graveyard would be impossible. So this was the closest to a decent burial for people like him, and there would be no shiva after the burial either.
Ernest got off the bus with the others. It rained mildly, not pouring as it had been a few days before. As one of the pallbearers, he carried the casket with Sigmund and two others. The casket tilted and lowered as they struggled to pull out their feet stuck in the mud. Finally, they made it to the resting place at the end of the lot near a dead oak tree.
Someone in a long white robe recited a string of words with a heavy nasal sound. Ernest listened, determined to remember the verses, to remember Mr. Schmidt—he had asked to borrow his toothbrush in the Embankment Building, the first friend he had made, and he had been a companion, a father figure when they started the business, a partner when the business thrived.
Golda came beside him and leaned on him. She had just recovered from the terrible chills and coughs and started to feel better. The heels of her shoes were caked with mud. She didn’t have other shoes; no one had extra shoes.
“He was the first friend I made, the first man I hired in the bakery. He was good at talking to people . . . Miriam . . .” And her. The terrible afternoon. The cold rain felt good on his face.
“You’re thinking about the Chinese girl.” Golda’s face was wet with rain, her green eyes clear like gems.