The War That Came Early: West and East (12 page)

No one said anything for some little while. The words held painfully obvious truth. Jews had always been scapegoats in Germany, the same way they had in Russia. When things went wrong somewhere else, you could set people banging on the kikes. Then you’d feel better, and the people would feel better, and if the Jews didn’t feel better, well, who cared about
them?
Banging on Jews was the national equivalent of kicking your cat after a cop gave you a ticket.

While Sarah got the dishes as clean as she could with cold water, her mother cut out the yellow stars and started sewing them onto clothes. After Sarah got done washing and drying, she sat down to help. The radio blared out insipid music, and then stories about how German bombers were pulverizing Paris and the
Luftwaffe
was singlehandedly driving the Communist hordes out of Poland.

Pausing for a moment, Sarah’s mother said, “If things were going as well as the newsmen say, we wouldn’t be sitting here doing this.”

“You think Father’s right, then?” Sarah asked.

“Your father is right most of the time,” Hanna Goldman answered. “The trouble is, he thinks that ought to do him some good.”

Samuel Goldman had already headed for bed. Sarah shut up and went back to sewing. Her mother didn’t usually sound so cynical; that was
more her father’s style. But people who’d been married a long time did have a way of growing together. And if sewing yellow Jewish stars onto clothes wasn’t enough to turn a saint cynical, what would be? How could you sink lower than this?

Sarah found out how the next afternoon, when she went out shopping. It was a mild, even a balmy, spring day. She wore a white linen blouse, probably the best one she owned. Or it had been the best one, anyhow, till the yellow star with the big black letters went onto her left breast.

People stared at her as she walked by. Of course they did. She would have stared herself if someone else had put on anything that ugly.
It wasn’t my idea!
she wanted to shout.
You’re the ones who voted for the Nazis. You did this. Not me!
But that wouldn’t have done her any good. Chances were it would have got her locked up. At least she had the sense to realize as much.

She saw a few other Jews out and about. They had to be, to get what they could in the scant time German regulations grudged them. Most looked as embarrassed as she felt. A few wore the star with dignity. And one or two might not have had it on, not by the way they acted. Sarah envied them their coolness, knowing she couldn’t come within kilometers of matching it.

Nobody pointed at her and jeered. She didn’t see Germans pointing and jeering at other Jews, either. She didn’t hear anybody yelling
Lousy kike!
or something filthier yet. Had even the Aryans had all the anti-Semitic propaganda they could stomach? She wouldn’t have imagined such a thing possible.

She wouldn’t have imagined it, but maybe it was. A fiftyish man with a double chin—he looked like a mason, or perhaps a plumber—walked down the street toward her. As they passed, he gravely tipped his hat and went on.

She almost tripped over her own feet in astonishment. Had someone from the SS seen him do that, he might have wound up in a concentration camp. At the least, he would have got a stern talking-to. It hadn’t stopped him. What was the world coming to? Sarah walked a little straighter after that.

Another man—this one an obvious veteran of the last war—tipped his
hat to her before she got to the grocer’s. She bought what vegetables she could and waited for the clerk to serve her. As long as any Aryans were in the shop, he was supposed to take care of them, even if they’d come in after she did.

But one of the women who had come in after her waved her forward, saying, “Go on, dear. You were next.”

“Are you sure?” Sarah feared a trap. When ordinary politeness could scare you … you were a Jew in the Third
Reich
. But the
Hausfrau
took two steps back and waved her to the counter. The clerk took her money and her ration coupons. She got out of the grocery as fast as she could.

On the way home, a middle-aged man—another obvious veteran, with a bad limp and a scarred face—nodded to her and said, “Congratulations on your medal, sweetheart.”

“Medal?” Sarah wished she hadn’t echoed it. That only gave him the chance to let fly with whatever nastiness bubbled inside of him.

He pointed to the yellow star. “Your
Pour le sémite
there.” He too tipped his hat, then stumped down the sidewalk.

Sarah needed a few seconds to get it. When she did, her jaw dropped. The highest German decoration in the last war—the equivalent of the modern Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, swords, and diamonds—had the simple French name of
Pour le mérite. For merit
, it meant. And this stranger had punned off it, inventing a medal called
For the Semite
. That took brains. It also took nerve. Suppose someone other than a Jew had heard. What would have happened to him then? Nothing good.

To her amazement, at supper her father reported the same joke from his labor gang. “It must be all over town, then!” she exclaimed.

“All over the country, I’d guess,” Father said. “Things like that, they spread faster than the grippe.”

“Why bother with the stupid stars, then, if they only make people laugh at them and treat us better instead of worse?” Sarah said.

“You’re asking the wrong person. You need to talk to the
Führer
, not me,” Samuel Goldman said. “But one thing did occur to me.”

“What’s that?” Sarah wondered if she really wanted to know.

“If the Party ever decides it wants to round up as many Jews as it can, we’re a lot easier to spot wearing our yellow stars.”

“Oh.” In a way, that made sense. In another … “Why would they want to do such a
meshuggineh
thing?” Sarah asked.

“Because they’re Germans, and they’re convinced we’re not,” her father said sadly. “If there’s more bad news from the front, who knows what they’ll do?”

No one knew. Even the Nazis didn’t, not yet. That was the scariest part about it.

PETE McGILL WAS IN LOVE
. This was his first time—the crushes he’d had on girls before he dropped out of high school to join the Corps didn’t count. So what if she was a White Russian taxi dancer who’d turned tricks on the side before Pete got to know her? If anything, that only made him burn harder.

His Marine buddies in Shanghai thought he’d gone round the bend. “Hey, man, don’t you think she still sleeps around for cash while you ain’t looking?” Herman Szulc asked in what were no doubt intended for reasonable tones.

Whatever they were intended for, they didn’t fly with Pete. “Watch your mouth, Shultzie, or I’ll rearrange your face for you,” he growled.

“You and who else?” Szulc didn’t back down from anybody. He was a leatherneck, too.

More Marines had to grab them and hold them back, or they would have gone for each other. “This sucks,” Pooch Puccinelli said. “I like drinking with both of you assholes, but now we can’t go out together. Soon as we all try it, you’ll have a couple and do your best to knock each other’s brains out.”

“He ain’t got no brains,” Szulc said.

“Fuck you, you dumb Polack,” Pete said. “Fuck your—” Somebody clapped a hand over his mouth before he could come out with anything irrevocable.

He went to see Vera whenever he got off duty. When he couldn’t see her, he thought about her. The touch of her, the scent of her, the taste of her … He had it bad, so bad he had no idea how bad it was. None so blind as he who will not see.

Vera, on the other hand, could see very clearly. She could see she had a meal ticket here. If things went the way she wanted them to, she wouldn’t have to sell her time and her body any more. She didn’t do it because she enjoyed it; she did it for the same reason a man built chairs: to make a living. She’d always hoped someone would fall for her so she wouldn’t have to any more. She hadn’t really expected it—it seemed like something out of a soppy movie. But she had hoped.

And now it had happened! A rich American, no less! (To Vera, all Americans were rich, even a Marine Corps corporal.) The rest of the girls at the Golden Lotus were madly jealous of her. In a different way, so was Sam Grynszpan, the Jew who owned the place. Like her, though for different reasons, he was what was bloodlessly called a stateless person. No rich American was likely to fall in love with him: he was short and squat and had a wide mouth and bulging eyes that made him look like a toad with five o’clock shadow.

Jealous or not, he gave good advice: “Don’t let this one get away.” His office was tiny and cramped and stank of stale cigar butts.

“Don’t worry—I won’t,” Vera answered. She spoke Russian to him. He used a mix of Russian and Polish with her, flavored with Yiddish and French. They could both get along in six or eight different languages. Going around with Pete was doing wonders for her English.

She could have been polishing her Japanese just as easily. Tall, busty blond women fascinated Asians, as she had reason to know. To her, these days, men were men, regardless of where they came from. Well, almost. She’d never met even a Japanese major as open-handed as Pete McGill.

“You may really get to like him—who the hell knows?” Grynszpan said.

“Maybe.” Vera left it right there. She knew Pete was nuts about her. She also knew exactly why: the sweaty athletics they performed together in her little upstairs room. He was a puppy. He didn’t want anything fancy. He hardly knew there was anything fancy to want. For Vera, that made life easy. Well, easier.

She was made up and perfumed and wearing a blue silk dress—easy and cheap to do in Shanghai—when he came to the club to get her two days later. His eyes lit up as soon as he saw her. That was exactly what
she’d had in mind. “Wow, babe! You look great!” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

Most of the men she’d been with would have groped her, just to show everyone around that they could. She wondered if anybody’d kissed her on the cheek since she was ten years old. Offhand, she didn’t think so. “What do we do? Where do we go?” she asked in English. That was the only language Pete knew, except for tiny bits of foul Chinese.

“We’ll go to the Vienna Ballroom, and we won’t dance,” Pete declared.

That was one of the half-dozen fanciest cabarets in Shanghai. It put the Golden Lotus to shame. (So did plenty of clubs a lot less fancy than the one Pete named.) “What you do? Win lottery?” Vera asked. She meant it. She played the lottery herself. Ten dollars Mex could win half a million. Odds were long, but the lottery was legit. People did win, and did get paid when they won.

“I’m not that rich, but I didn’t do bad. Had me four jacks when this other guy was mighty proud of his full house,” Pete answered. He started to reach for his wallet, as if to show off how fat it was, but then stopped. You could land in all kinds of trouble if you flashed a roll in Shanghai—or in Dubuque, come to that.

The Vienna Ballroom sat at the corner of Majestic Road and Bubbling Well Road. The yellow brick building would have looked more at home in Vienna than it did in the Orient, but that was true of most of the International Settlement and the French Concession. Hard-faced guards with Lee-Enfield rifles stood outside the place. They were probably soldiers from one army or another who hadn’t felt like leaving China when their tours were up. They only nodded to Pete and his lady. They were there to keep out the strife between Chinese and Japanese.

Inside, Celis’ All-Star Orchestra blared away: second-rate jazz, with most of the tuxedoed musicians Chinese and the rest from all over the world. Pete wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the white players were ex-soldiers, too. China got under some guys’ skins the way Vera had got under his.

The maitre d’ sized him up. A U.S. Marine in dress blues … two chevrons … not the best table. Expecting that, Pete slipped the guy a little
something. Things improved: less than he would have liked, but enough to keep him from grousing out loud.

“Champagne, sir?” the fellow asked.

“You bet,” Pete answered. He winked at Vera. “You get to drink the real stuff tonight, babe.” She summoned up a blush.

He ordered steaks big enough to have come off the side of an elephant and rare enough to have still been mooing a couple of minutes earlier. Vera stared at hers in amazement but made it disappear as fast as Pete’s.
Waste not, want not
had been drilled into her since she was a baby, when her mother and father made it to Manchuria one short jump ahead of the Reds. When the Japanese took Harbin, she’d made it to Shanghai the same way. If she jumped the right way now …

Some of the men out on the dance floor were European and American businessmen hanging on in Shanghai in spite of the widening war between China and Japan. Some were Japanese businessmen and officers. And some were sleek, plump Chinese collaborators in expensive suits, whirling their partners around as if Satchmo himself fronted the All-Star Orchestra.

Every single Oriental man danced with a white woman: almost all of them with a blonde or a redhead. Pete tried to guess which girls were hostesses here, which mistresses. Some danced better than others, but that was his only clue. The Japs and Chinamen all looked uncommonly smug.
See? We’ve got the West by the short hairs
, they might have been saying.

A Chinese man with gray at the temples came up to Vera and said,
“Willst du tanzen?”

Even Pete could figure out that much German. “She’s my friend,” he said. “She doesn’t work here.”

He wasn’t surprised when the Chinese fellow understood English; he’d assumed the man would. The Chinese eyed him, maybe wondering whether to make something out of it. Since Pete was half his age and twice his size, he decided not to: one of his smartest business decisions ever. He walked off, muttering what probably weren’t compliments in Chinese.

A few minutes later, something big blew up a few blocks away. The lights flickered and went out for a couple of seconds. Celis’ All-Star Orchestra discorded down into silence. A woman squealed. A man yelled,
“Merde!”
Then the power came on again. The master of ceremonies, a grin pasted onto his Eurasian face, called, “All part of life in Shanghai, folks! Next round on the house!”