“What are you doing, Golda?”
“I want to see you happy.”
“It’s late.”
“I don’t mind, Ernest.”
He blinked. The warmth, the sleeplessness, muddled his mind.
She took his hand and slipped it under her skirt. She was not wearing stockings or underwear.
He shuddered. He didn’t know who he was anymore. A fire burst inside him; a carapace of impossible longing swallowed him. He longed to be lost in an agonizing oblivion, to forget his mistake, to be forgotten. He let his pants drop, pulled her close, and entered her.
A few days later, Ernest was groggy with sleep when he heard someone knocking on the door. Two Japanese soldiers in uniforms stood outside the bakery.
“May I help you?” He snapped awake. How long had it been since Yamazaki’s visit? Three months? Four months? But Yamazaki was still alive, he had been told.
The soldiers asked to see his passport and the passports of all the workers in the bakery. Explaining he was a German citizen who had lost his passport, Ernest gave them the only identification card he had, the one issued by the Settlement at the wharf when he arrived. He couldn’t make sense of what the soldiers were saying—their English was broken—but it was clear they were investigating the assault of Yamazaki.
They took all of them to a station nearby, where they sat for hours. Ernest was ordered to answer to someone on a phone. Over and over, he heard questions in German with a strong Japanese accent: “Was ist Ihre Nationalit?t und wo wurden Sie geboren? Wann sind Sie nach Shanghai gekommen?”
He tensed. “Ich bin Deutscher und wurde in Berlin geboren. 1940 kam ich nach Shanghai.”
“Haben Sie einen Offizier angegriffen?”
“Nein, ich habe keinen Offizier angegriffen.”
He was detained for two days, and finally, he was told to leave.
Mr. Bitker sent him a hunk of meat as a token of thanks for helping the refugees and in celebration of his release. Ernest shared it with his people in the bakery. Every living day was like a steak, they said.
It was the first steak he’d had for the past three years. He gathered it on his plate, sliced it into strips, then in cubes, and then put a piece in his mouth, and chewed. He tried to enjoy it, savoring every bit—the flavor, the texture. It was true. Every living day was a steak.
He wanted to make more money, both for his own survival and for the refugees who depended on him. When the puppet government led by Wang Jingwei ordered all Nationalist currency off the market and replaced them with its own notes, new fabi, at a rate of two to one, the cost of living doubled overnight, and so did the value of the apartments Ernest had acquired. He sold them promptly.
With the cash he had, he bought bags of rice, flour, wheat, dried beans, dried fish, dried sweet potatoes, laces, bolts of silk, straw hats, cotton coats—anything he could get his hands on through his Chinese business associates. He also asked Mr. Bitker to introduce him to the wealthy Chinese merchants who sold coal, seasonings, and kerosene.
It was easy for him to do business, for word spread that he was reliable and generous. With Mr. Bitker’s help, Ernest made friends with the Swiss, the Canadians, and the Americans who had escaped from the Japanese dragnet. Through his own connections, he did underground business with the local Shanghai families, textile factories, and packaging companies. The Chinese liked him, and sometimes they even invited him for tea.
Once he let it slip that he had fallen in love with a Chinese girl, and she loved him as well, but he had let her go. The Chinese businessmen nodded. It was wise of him, they said; people from different countries shouldn’t marry.
In November, he heard a Japanese battleship was capsized by the USS Washington in the Solomon Islands, and Japan, with its assets frozen in the US, ordered the Wang Jingwei puppet government to provide all essential food supplies such as rice, oil, coal, and salt to support their soldiers in Shanghai. A major shortage of essentials haunted the city. Inflation, which had been a plague, worsened. A single grape cost thirty cents in American dollars. Ernest resold the bags of merchandise at skyrocketing prices.
He became a wealthy man.
68
AIYI
On a cold morning in December, I threw myself against the headboard, sweat raining down my face, onto my neck, and down to my naked stomach. After two days of howling and groaning, tormented by waves of contractions, I was utterly spent, my legs sprawled, my bottom stuck to the pool of mucus on a thin sheet. It was such a relief to know I had pushed it out; my body was free.
But I felt no happiness, no peace, only this hollowness, this bottomless grief. I had been a beautiful girl, a desirable woman, a shrewd businesswoman who would have been the wealthiest woman in Asia. Yet here I was, sweating, hemorrhaging, bloating, giving birth to a child I didn’t want, a woman forsaken, a helpless thing with no future. How did I let my life get out of my control?