Drexel motioned to her with a flick of his hand that she could stop playing, and Emi stood up and looked out at the table, still covered in trays of food.
“Give me your watch and I’ll tell you where the food comes from,” one of the kitchen girls whispered to her when she got close enough. Emi looked down at her, her apron tied around her waist twice, she was so thin. And young. She barely looked like a teenager.
“My watch?” said Emi, quietly, looking down at her timepiece, which was one of her mother’s old ones. She had not been permitted to take her good watch with her to Karuizawa, since her parents wanted her to blend in. “Why would you want it?”
“Who cares why I want it, I want it,” she whispered back in coarse Japanese. “Give it to me and I’ll tell you where they hide the ham.”
“Hide the ham . . .” Emi replied, walking to the bathroom as Drexel had made it clear that her work was done. She just needed to change and put as much food in her bag as she could without making a commotion.
The kitchen girl followed her in and held out her hand. Seeing that Emi had other clothes with her, she said, “Give me that dress, too. I want it.”
Too curious to say no, Emi removed her dress in front of the girl and took off her watch.
The girl looked at Emi’s other clothes and seeming satisfied, said, “They have a farm. The Germans. It’s a long walk from town, north of the Mampei Hotel, past the Kumanokōtai Shrine.”
“How do you know about it?” Emi asked skeptically.
“I worked there once,” she said defensively.
“In what capacity?”
“What’s it matter to you?” She paused and looked at Emi. “Give me those shoes, too. The heeled ones.”
“They won’t fit you. I’m half a meter taller than you,” said Emi, not stepping out of them.
“I don’t care,” said the girl. “You have the other ugly pair in that bag. I saw you when you came in.”
Emi looked at the girl’s feet, pressed into a pair of worn heels, the shoe leather nearly porous, and gave them to her.
“You telling me about a farm is worth all this?” she asked, slipping on her pants and coat over her silk slip.
“They have food,” she said shrugging. “That officer seems to like you. Maybe he will let you eat some. You need it. You look like a twig.”
“You’re not fat yourself,” said Emi.
“Which is why I’ve been to the farm.” She slipped out of the bathroom door, leaving Emi to collect herself before she left.
When Emi opened the door a few minutes later, Drexel was standing next to it.
“This is what you want, yes?” He didn’t ask about the kitchen girl, instead handing her a heavy paper bag. Already, the bottom was soaked in oil from the food.
“Yes,” said Emi, reaching out for it.
“I will look for you in town,” said Drexel. “You’ll play for me at the hotel when I’m there. Whatever song I want.”
“Of course,” said Emi, “if I know it.”
When she left she didn’t thank him, instead opening the door quickly and leaving him to close it behind her. She stood on the porch and let the cold air, colder than even a winter in Vienna, spiral into her lungs. She was surprised and she didn’t know what to do with her surprise. The men at the party, other than Drexel when she’d arrived, had not acted like beasts. It was almost worse, she thought, to see traces of their humanity married with the barbarity of their uniforms.
Emi got onto her bicycle, the seat wet with snow and rain, and started to pedal away from the house. She had only gone a few yards when she heard her name, and then saw Claire, stepping out from the woods behind the house.
Emi nearly fell, the bicycle tipping, the food managing to stay in the basket.
“Did you get any food?” asked Claire, rushing over to her.
“You scared me,” said Emi, trying to steady herself. “I did and I would have brought you some tomorrow. How long have you been hiding?”
“Tonight it will taste so much better than tomorrow,” said Claire, eyeing the bag.
Emi started to untie it, as Claire asked her about the party. Consumed in what they were doing, they did not hear the footsteps until the people were next to them. Emi looked up and saw the pretty German woman who had opened the door standing next to her, one arm linked with a member of the Kempeitai.
The woman smiled at Emi and then knocked the bag of food to the ground with her gloved hand. “No English,” she declared as her Kempeitai escort laughed.
“No English,” he repeated, stepping on the large loaf of bread that had rolled out. He looked at the ham, too, which had also fallen out, but it was already submerged in a puddle.
Emi and Claire stood still, watching the two walk to their car, parked by the side of the road, and didn’t move until they had driven off.
“Quick!” yelled Claire, pouncing on the bag. “Get that ham out of the water. We can rinse it off.” Emi got on her knees and reached for it as Claire pulled the flattened bread up, trying to pull dirt and twigs off it.
“Take half of this,” said Emi, ripping the chunk of the wet ham apart with her hands, wishing Claire had just waited until the following day.
“Do you know where the Germans get all this food?” she asked, watching her wrap it in a paper sack that she had brought.
“They make most of it,” said Claire, tying the bag closed. “They have their own farm, north of the Mampei Hotel. And unlike everyone else in the prefecture, they have healthy animals—pigs, cows, chickens, goats—vegetables and grain.”
“You know about the farm?” asked Emi, caught unaware.
“Of course,” said Claire, holding the bread up to her nose and inhaling deeply. “A lot of people do.”
“Of course,” said Emi, regretting how vulnerable she had been just moments before.
“Don’t tell the Moris that the food fell in the mud,” said Claire, taking a large bite out of the bread, despite its layer of filth.
Emi nodded and pushed her bike up the hill away from Claire. She was sure that it was the start of her telling the Moris very little.
CHAPTER 27
LEO HARTMANN
JANUARY–APRIL 1944
Leo’s green eyes did not open for thirty days. The Chinese doctors at the mission hospital, where Agatha had taken him in a rickshaw, his near-lifeless body bouncing on the wooden seat like a corpse, said that his left lung had collapsed and that his right eye had been so badly damaged that he’d probably lost his vision on that side. It was also possible, they warned her, that he might never wake up.
Agatha—wearing a white doctor’s coat given to her by one of the religious nurses who had nearly fainted when she’d seen her exposed cleavage—cried for hours over Leo’s broken body the first night. She was scared of everything, she told the medical staff, who came into the bleak room constantly—the hospital, the darkness outside, Leo’s slack, torpid face.
She’d last been in that particular hospital when her mother died in 1933, she’d explained, hysteria finding her once again.
“From what?” a doctor asked gently.