She looked at Jin and said, “But the Chinese can run freely.”
Leo translated again, and Jin started laughing, shaking his head at Eliza Behnisch.
“Run freely! We haven’t run freely since before the Japanese occupation in ’37. They killed three hundred thousand people when they occupied Nanjing. Ask those people’s families if their children are running freely. And it’s no better here. Tell her to walk to the stadium and read the sign. ‘No Dogs or Chinese.’ Has she seen that? Or the children strangled to death by the Japanese soldiers for sport near the railway?”
He looked to Leo to translate, and Leo turned to the neighbor and said, “Yes. He agrees with you.”
“I have to go to work,” said Hani. “Leo and Jin, are you coming?”
After the three left, Hani walked the boys to the nightclub, saying hello in her poor English to Liwei.
“The offer to work in my establishment will always stand, Mrs. Hartmann,” he said, after he had kissed her hand. “You wouldn’t have to do anything untoward. Just chat with the city’s lonely men. I am sure they would pay handsomely to see those funny freckles close up.”
“My English. It is still unsatisfactory,” she said politely, making the same excuse she’d been making for the last two years. She left to go to her job, and Jin and Leo went inside to wash glasses.
“I can’t believe we live in that place now,” said Leo as he washed. “I’m thankful we have somewhere to live, of course, but it still feels strange to be dirt poor.”
“Everyone is poor,” said Jin, shrugging. “War doesn’t make anyone rich except the depraved. And they still have to loot.”
“I’m washing dishes in a brothel. Are you sure I’m not one of the depraved?” said Leo, turning on the hot water and thinking of his house in Vienna, which he was sure was looted down to its studs.
“This isn’t a brothel,” said Jin. “There’s nothing for sale here except the alcohol. Plus, I started to work here when I was ten. If you’re depraved, then I’m truly sick. Plus,” he said, handing Leo a sponge, “from what you’ve told me, it’s better than Vienna, yes?”
“Yes,” said Leo. “We’re very lucky. Bad as it can be, Shanghai is the Jewish Shangri-la.”
CHAPTER 23
EMI KATO
DECEMBER 1943
Emi did not look back at her parents after they brought her to Ueno Station in Tokyo. She took her two suitcases from her father, gave them to a porter, then walked to the platform where her ten-car steam-powered train was already waiting. Looking up at the train, with various stripes on its windows indicating first, second, and third class, she thought about her father’s words: “I’m worried that you will be killed.” A war was tearing her country apart—it was still her country, despite the war she didn’t agree with—and her parents could die on a streetcar or somewhere worse. She regretted that she had parted from them flushed with anger. Once settled in her first-class seat for the five-hour journey, she opened her small bag, taking out her letter-writing box and stamps. She quickly penned a letter of apology to her parents, noting that she obviously needed to be sent away to grow up a little more. The time in the internment camp hadn’t seemed to do it. She told them she loved them and that she was sure they would see each other again soon.
We have to, she thought to herself, her body aching at the thought of anything happening to her little family. Emi bit the inside of her cheeks, looked out the window, and decided that however good or bad Karuizawa was, she would handle her time there as gracefully as she could manage.
As she let her arm hang over her armrest, glad that the seat next to her was unoccupied, she remembered Christian telling her about his train ride to Crystal City, holding the hand of seven-year-old Inge for thirty-one hours. She smiled at the thought. Christian, more than she, had been thrown in the deep end with no warning. She had lived through Vienna, was used to getting certain looks in Washington. He was a golden boy living a seemingly perfect American life, until the government decided that his family wasn’t American enough. She pictured Christian, walking around Crystal City as shocked as she had been before she started working at the hospital, before she met him. All the high school girls’ eyes would follow him as he made his way between school and work, and eventually the orchard. All those pretty German girls, but he had chosen her. She hoped that he would write to her in Japan from Crystal City, and that by some miracle, the letters would reach her. She had told her mother to please send the letters down if he did, as she had given up on receiving anything from Leo, though she was still writing to him every now and then at the only address she had.
“If something terrible had happened to the Hartmanns in Shanghai, we would have gotten word,” her father had told her in Tokyo. Emi liked to think that was true, but who would get word to them? Leo’s letters were obviously being destroyed or lost en route.
When the train finally sputtered out of the station in a cloud of black smoke, precisely on schedule and accompanied by the sound of the stationmaster’s whistle, Emi looked out the window as rows of houses gave way to a vista of endless rice paddies dotted with distant farmhouses. What would Christian be doing in Crystal City night after night at sunset? she wondered. She enjoyed the thought of him missing her, thinking about her in the swimming pool in her navy blue bathing suit, or in the orchard wearing less than that. She would continue to cry over Leo, especially with her uncertainty about his life in Shanghai, but not over Christian. Her mother had assured her that the officials in camp said the Germans were staying until late 1944. Until he left Crystal City, she was sure he’d be safe.
The atmosphere on the train was solemn, even in the luxurious first-class compartment with its hardwood floors and blue velvet seats that swiveled so that passengers could face to the front or rear. Soldiers went back and forth checking passengers’ papers, not in order, but at random. The government issued travel permits, and no one could board a train without one. Emi’s was tucked tight against her identification card. Her father had told her that foreigners’ travel was severely restricted but that there would be some gaijin going to Karuizawa. That was where the government wanted them—all together, easier to watch.