But each day Ernest pestered me. “Did you find it? Did you find it?”
It was easy to lie, but it gave me stress to see him disappointed. So I talked to my chauffeur again, gave him a gold earring, and asked him to find a reliable ferryman. He would arrange everything for me, my chauffeur said, nodding in his nonstop way.
When I told Ernest about the camp and the ferryman, he looked so happy I wanted to change my mind.
57
ERNEST
By the dawn light, he jumped in a small banana boat Aiyi had helped arrange.
The boat wobbled away from the wooden pier, and he turned around to face the island of Pudong where the tobacco factories, cotton mills, and oil factories stood. From the Settlement, it didn’t look too far, but the river was wider than he thought. And the water was a cranky, foul monster of a swamp overflowing with rusty hulks of freighters, dunes of fetid fish innards, and piles of black sunken ships and decayed coffin planks with their lamentable owners. The river was a trap.
He held tight to the edge as the boat swayed through the channel of rusty hulls hanging with precarious sails. The wind rattled the sails, brittle and threatening to break any second. The tide was strong; the boat reeled, and heaps of broken engine parts hurtled toward him headlong, almost crashing into him. Then the boat spun sideways and got stuck among mounds of blackened weeds and a drove of bloated bodies. Ernest grabbed a spare oar and stabbed, fighting their way out, his stomach churning.
The Japanese patrol was scouring, its engines rumbling faintly, and now and then the searchlight pierced the dim dawn light. Nervous, he pulled down the straw hat on his head.
When the boat finally reached the jetty on the island, he let out the breath he’d been holding, gestured to the ferryman, and jumped onto the muddy ground. In front of him sprawled a one-story cotton mill with two towering chimneys, next to it three soot-covered oil factories, adjacent to what appeared to be a dog farm and a few shanties with clotheslines in the front yards. Beyond the factories in the far distance were the endless rice fields and a sea of reeds and grass. Several peasants with bare muddy feet walked toward him, eyeing him suspiciously.
Ernest wondered who they thought he was. A businessman? A spy? A camp runaway? For they were staring intently at his eyes and then glancing at his hat, jacket, and shoes. Alarmed, he walked quickly down the dirt road toward the cotton mill. Behind it, right in the shadow of the oil factories was the tobacco factory, a massive square brick building with murals of tobacco, where a sentry in a khaki uniform guarded the front entry. He wondered what he should do. If he walked up to the sentry and asked to visit the prisoners, the man could arrest him as an enemy alien and take him prisoner.
He circled to the back of the building from an oil factory’s side. Next to a gasoline barrel, he lay flat and watched the prisoners, all in black-and-white striped shirts, inside a tall barbed wire fence. He heard English. He had come to the right place.
Some voices came from behind him. The barefoot peasants were coming at him, holding hoes. He had yet to get up when two men caught his shoulders. “What do you want? Wait, wait! Stop!”
They took his shoes, his trousers, his hat, and his jacket. Ernest returned to the jetty, humiliated. The ferry Aiyi hired, thank God, was still waiting for him.
He crossed the river again a few days later, holding Miss Margolis’s red scarf. Walking along the barbed wire fence in the back, he waved the scarf, hoping to attract the attention of the prisoners who congregated inside. But a Japanese guard shouted. Ernest hid behind an empty gasoline barrel near a muddy track.
Never once did he catch sight of Miss Margolis.
“Maybe she’s not in the camp,” Aiyi said. She was naked, pacing in the hot, humid room. She had no fresh clothes, she said; the ready-made tunic he’d bought didn’t fit. “Will you give up?”
“I can’t.”
“I won’t pay for the ferryman again.” She looked irritated.
“What’s wrong, Aiyi? You don’t mean that, do you? Maybe I should try the camp in Longhua.”
“You’re on your own then. It’s near a graveyard. If the Japanese don’t kill you, the ghosts will haunt you.”
He hugged her, coaxing her, cheering her up. “I’m a ghost, too, a foreign ghost, remember? I doubt they’ll go after me. How about giving me one more chance? Give Pudong one last try?”
58
AIYI
It started to rain. My Nash passed Kiessling’s, where Japanese soldiers, who were on every block these days, were drinking beer. Rumor said an entire regiment from Japan had arrived in Shanghai and was preparing to swoop down on the Nationalists and Communists hidden in the central cities in China.