“I wasn’t aware that there was such a food shortage here,” said Emi, putting her hand against her mushrooms.
“But it must be the same in Tokyo,” said Claire, stopping Emi and pointing out a large hole in the ground. “Worse, with such a large population. You can’t find mushrooms in the middle of the city, can you?”
“I’d be surprised,” said Emi. “Perhaps my parents were just hiding the truth from me, or they are being treated better than most, for now. I couldn’t say.”
“This hole,” said Claire, “all this.” She ran her hands against a large wall of dirt. “It’s pumice from a terrible volcanic eruption, about a hundred and fifty years ago. It killed thousands, tens of thousands, the eruption itself and then the famine it caused.”
“Mount Asama?” asked Emi, of the large active volcano that loomed over the town.
“That’s the one.”
Claire put her finger to her lips as they heard the step of a deer that had just come through the brush. “A Sika doe. Those we do eat,” she whispered. “Do you have a gun with you?”
“Of course not,” Emi whispered back. The animal, startled by the women, turned around and bounded off.
“Too bad,” said Claire, motioning for Emi to follow her to the main street. “Maybe you’ll get to eat venison with the German officers.”
Emi hadn’t had meat since the Gripsholm, and the cuts of beef on the ship were mostly browned fat remolded to look like steak. She’d had venison in Germany and Austria before and though she found the taste too rich, she was coming to understand that in Karuizawa, as Claire said, if it was edible, you ate it.
Perhaps it was luck that Emi wasn’t feeling hunger pains yet, or it was that her body had adapted to surviving on much less after her boat journey. She said as much to Claire, who pointed out that Emi’s pants were almost slipping off her frame. Emi looked down, unbuttoned her coat, and pulled them up, rolling the waistband twice.
“Start with trying to get some sustenance at Drexel’s party,” said Claire. “My advice is play late into the night, and then when they are drunk—and they will be wildly drunk—you pack up all the remaining food and bring it home. Don’t pick and choose, just take anything. Take their half-eaten chicken legs, crumbs from the floor. Steal it all. Even if it’s soup, find a way to transport it. If you have enough, bring some to me the next day. But feed the Moris first, of course. What a way to live out their twilight years,” said Claire as the town’s main street, the ginza, came into view. “With more war.”
*
A wet snow had begun to fall the afternoon of the party, starting and stopping like bursts of tears throughout the day, but Emi rode Mrs. Mori’s old bicycle, the spokes stiff with rust, to Hans Drexel’s house at the other end of Karuizawa anyway. She felt like she deserved some sort of physical punishment before entertaining men like Drexel. The Moris had warned her that if anything untoward were to happen, that she was to leave at once, food or not, and had pleaded with her to take their old car. Emi admitted to them that she was a poor driver, always having been ferried by others, or hopping on and off public transport all over the world.
“I understand we need food but I don’t like you going,” Jiro had said, watching Emi take the bicycle out of the Moris’ garden shed. “Especially not on that old contraption.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Emi, after she had finished putting air in the tires, but she was as nervous as Jiro Mori. What had happened to the girl in Austria who held hands with Leo? Now she was going to a Nazi officer’s party.
In her best dress, tucked into wool pants and under a winter coat, she tried not to fall in the slush, walking the bicycle up the small hills until she reached the wooded corner that hid Drexel’s house. The large home, a former American missionary’s, was set well back, like most of the summer places were. Emi only saw three cars parked out front and guessed that Drexel was having her, one of the help, arrive before the guests.
There were no Christmas decorations on the porch or fa?ade, like Emi was used to seeing in Europe; instead there was the only adornment that the Nazis had cared about since 1920: the swastika. The party flag hung above the front door, attached to a line of cedar bark that edged the roof. The first time she had seen that flag hanging vertically was when Adolf Hitler spoke at the Heldenplatz in Vienna. Now she was walking into a house that displayed it, and in her own country. She pulled her eyes down, sickened to think what she was prepared to do for something to eat.
She stepped onto the porch, past a line of handcarved rockers, and knocked softly on the door. A young Caucasian woman in a perfectly steamed evening dress opened the door and looked with disdain at Emi in her thick, muddy clothes.
“Incorrect house,” she said in accented Japanese, her face cold and dismissive. She moved to close the door but Emi was able to catch it with her shoe before it slammed shut in her face.
“I’m here to play the piano,” Emi said in German, assuming it was her mother tongue. She pressed the door open a few more inches with her toe and looked down at the done-up woman, who was, despite her heels, several inches shorter than her. “I was invited by Standartenführer Hans Drexel.”
She looked at Emi’s wet coat and the black bicycle against the tree behind her, raised her pencil-drawn eyebrows, and said, “Wait.”
When Hans Drexel appeared, several minutes later, he was not wearing the heavy, gray-green Nazi uniform that he had on at the hotel, but a tuxedo-styled dress uniform covered in SS insignia. It showed off his firm build and handsome appearance, made more striking by his dark hair and light eyes. Like Leo, Emi thought.
“You have come to entertain us. And you brought winter with you.” Drexel took in her shabby appearance with evident disapproval, his green eyes moving slowly over her shapeless, wool-covered body.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her apology turning her stomach. “I don’t intend to play in these clothes. If you let me change, I will return looking better.”
“Thank goodness,” he said, and let her move farther inside the house. “My bedroom is just upstairs.” He put his hand on her back and rubbed it hard along her vertebrae, all the way past her tailbone. “Let me escort you up. We have some time before you need to start playing.”
“A bathroom will suffice,” Emi said, stepping away, the feel of his fingers hot and lingering.