“Let me out!” It was quiet outside. I kicked the door in frustration.
Three weeks into February, Ying delivered me more grave news of war. The Japanese had poured into Singapore, and the mighty British troops fell apart under the onslaught. Singapore surrendered in seven days, and thousands of British, Indian, and Australian troops were captured and sent to internment camps. “I hear a Japanese submarine even shelled an oil refinery near California! The Americans want to retaliate, but what can they do? They have navy aircraft carriers in Hawaii, but they don’t have long-range bombers to fly across to Tokyo and return to Hawaii.”
Very soon, Ying said, the Japanese would take over all of Asia. Just like Yamazaki had boasted.
I wondered how he received such detailed news, but I couldn’t care less what territory the Japanese had conquered.
“Ying,” I said. “If you’re not going to let me out, at least let me talk to my chauffeur.”
“What for?”
“So I can tell whether you were lying.”
He obliged, and when my chauffeur came, he confirmed some of what Ying had said. The foreigners were indeed rounded up and sent to camps. I could hardly believe it, but my chauffeur was most loyal, driving me around since I was six. I often gave him a fat envelope at the Chinese New Year as a token of my gratitude.
“Listen,” I said, my lips near the gap of the doors. “Go to his apartment and see if you can find him. You know where his apartment is. Find him, make sure he’s safe, and tell him I want to see him.”
When my chauffeur left, I paced in my room, anxious.
Seven days before my wedding.
53
ERNEST
The wailing of a Klaxon awoke him. The dawn’s pale fingers hadn’t reached the windows, and the room was yawning with night’s shadows. He sat up, thinking of her, and with some jealousy, he hoped that Cheng would make her happy.
Ernest put on his dark-taupe coat and went to the bakery that sold bagels for breakfast. Miriam followed behind in her black hood. She was still grumpy, but the windfall had cheered her up somewhat. She would go wherever he asked her, and sometimes he caught her eyeing the messenger bag hung behind the headboard.
Outside, the February sky was a waxy sprawl; the air a mournful, chilly pall; and the streets bleak and desolate, drenched in sheets of cold rain. The broad avenue Bubbling Well Road, which had always bustled with people and automobiles, was empty. He encountered not a single pedestrian. There was no music from clubs, no squeaking of rickshaws, no honking of automobiles; as far as he could see, all the fur shops, porcelain boutiques, calendar stalls, nightclubs, and opium dens in the hidden alleys that had been part of the city’s landscape were closed. The other day, when he’d gone to the French hospital for more morphine, he had found out it was closed, too, and the nuns had disappeared.
Ernest passed a block where a stray dog was attacking a beggar’s still body, turned a corner, and finally reached the bakery. It was about six o’clock, but the clock tower, which had switched to Tokyo time, said it was seven.
“Good morning.” He took off his fedora and greeted the people inside. He loved this bakery and cherished seeing his fellow people, like Mr. Schmidt, here. They gave him hope that he was with a community, not alone in this dreadful world. This was also the only place where he could find decent food since all the restaurants and stalls were closed, and hotels like Sassoon’s only accepted Japanese and their European ally, the Germans. It was temporary, he hoped; soon, life would become normal and peddlers would appear on the street again.
No one greeted him back; a heavy, depressive air hung in the bakery. Mr. Schmidt, hunched in a corner, was weeping, and Mrs. Kauser, the stout woman in a flour-speckled apron, bawled near the counter. The Japanese had rounded up her husband, an American, and taken him to an internment camp. She, German by birth, had been spared; for the sake of their children, she must flee Shanghai as well.
“Ernest, are you going to help?” Miriam was talking into his ear.
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear? Mrs. Kauser is fleeing Shanghai. She’s going to close the bakery.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I can do.” He was sad to see the bakery, the only place he could go for breakfast, would close. With the imprisonment of the wealthy British and Americans, refugees like him were truly on their own.
“Think of something! You’re rich now.”
He looked at the sad faces, the small round tables covered with red-and-white checked cloth, the aluminum utensils, and the brick-built oven beyond the counter. Miriam was right. “Mrs. Kauser, what do you say I purchase the bakery from you? You can have some cash in your pocket when you leave, and we’ll keep this place open.”