Someday We Will Fly: Chapters 4–7

Even though rumors flew, of illness, crime, even murder, so many possible deaths coming at us, I had to escape, flee the Heime’s stifling air and devastated adults.

A group of Chinese men walked by wearing hats that obscured their faces, carrying cages with birds inside, swinging them rhythmically.

Yellow rickshaws rattled by on every side, driven by men made of muscle, no hats or sleeves to protect them from the sun.

Fish struggled to flop in packed tubs, frogs and snakes writhed and tangled.

Fear wobbled me, made me look all over, my head turning a marionette’s circles.

Workers swarmed, sawed, and hammered at a broken building, from which debris blew.

“Apparently the Japanese believe Jews are powerful,” he told me, as if I were his adult friend. He laughed a sharp, bitter bark I’d never heard. “They think we're mystical, that letting us live here might help them. Imagine.”

“It was so calm after...” But he didn’t finish his sentence, and I thought he was speaking to himself again, wondered calm after what, the turbulent ocean? Our ruined lives at home?

The women had hollow cheeks and bruised eyes, the men thick beards. We kids had limbs like kindling.

Would Papa admit he never attended services, because religion oppressed more than it liberated, because human beings had to create our own codes, as he loved to say?

I stopped listening and walked away, the summer heat infusing me until I wobbled and my thinking bubbled.

I tried to coax Naomi into speaking so I wouldn’t be so alone.

The girls ran by and peeked into the door, giggling, saying, “Nihao, nihao!” Hello, hello! Naomi was riveted. When they ran away, still laughing, Naomi stared at the door hopefully.

The river roiled and waved out to the horizon.

In the kitchen I started water boiling, cracked the intact egg into a cup, and tried to salvage the insides of others, picking out shattered shell.

I’ll help build the new synagogue after all. And translate paperwork for the Joint Distribution Committee. I’m the most observant I’ve ever been.

Mrs. Aarons just nodded, her brow furrowing deeper. She must have heard countless stories of broken lives and missing mothers.

“At Kadoorie we take care of one another. We only started running full-time recently—last year, we held some classes and a fresh-air camp for Jewish children—well, at an unused tuberculosis sanatorium in Hongjiao, of all places!”

Before the war, we had never pleaded. If we ever arrived at that luxurious position again, I would remember this feeling—of scalding fear and humiliation—forever.

I tried to accept the gifts casually, but my heart expanded until it couldn’t fit in my body.

“Say the things you like most,” Mrs. Campton prompted.

If I got in trouble, I should find a policeman who was Sikh, with a beard, wearing white clothing and a turban. He would treat a foreign girl more gently, being foreign himself. Not a Chinese policeman, who worked for the Shanghai Municipal Council, or a Russian policeman. Worst of all would be a Japanese soldier.

We had to make a list of the organs of respiration: mouth, nose, larynx, trachea. The trachea divides into tubes.

I studied blood: capillaries; veins; the heart, a pumping, tired muscle.

I clapped until orange sparks filled our drab room.

And my heart climbed straight to the rafters, swung across my mind like a happy acrobat.

He turned and kicked the blankets into a billowing tent, until a light came on high above him.

A slow, strange revulsion moved through me, infusing my blood. The rat’s bones were visible through his bent back, and he seemed barely able to move.

She drew jewels on them, using a red pencil to flush their cheeks with health.

“It’s the Shanghai Club, where rich men drink and eat, even now. My mom says it’s appalling that people would spend money on entertainment when others don’t have food.”

We used little circles and dollar signs to represent the seven hundred Sephardic Jews whose fathers and grandfathers arrived from Iraq as traders in the mid-1800s and became tycoons.

It was completely dark by the time I walked back past the public gardens, between the Astor House Hotel and the Russian and German consulates.

He is giving transit visas so Jews can get out by traveling through Japan. He saved all the Yeshiva boys.

“...dangerously unrealistic. They will pay for such stubborn complacency! The middle class? They have money, they have had power for years. They feel they have God's will on their side, so they can sehv ve’al taase.”
Gabriel turned to me and translated, even though I knew sehv ve’al taase meant to stay still, do nothing.

The reason those selfish boys are all here is because the Japanese moved them. They’re consolidating us.