Someday We Will Fly: Chapter 13–Encore

“Patrons have genuine and meaningful relationships with performers,” Mr. Takati said.

“They’re called geishas,” he said. “It means ‘artful ones.’ Our artful ones dance and sing, and some recite poetry.”

The air was thick with incense and choking hope that reminded me of the Heime, of mosquito coils we had burned our first summer here, disappearing into curls of smoke and engulfing the insects that devoured us anyway.

And here came my sister, dismal, skinny, impoverished, but smiling up at me, singing.

And here came my sister, dismal, skinny, impoverished, but smiling up at me, singing.

I wanted to find Mr. Takati before Madame Su found me, but from the middle of the room she was coming toward me, squeezing her squat boxy body between tables and chairs.

Madame Su froze in place, arms crossed, gaze livid.

Fu danced onto the stage, dispatched by Madame Su to end my act.

“Alenka? What kind of name is that? Where are you from?”
I paused, wanting to name a place as far away from me as possible.
“Don’t be coy,” he said.

Mr. Michener was crying, his once plump face a gaunt and lavender shadow.

I almost told him about Taube, almost said we had pooled all we had, peeled General Barbeaux’s dirty bills apart to help pay to bury our beloved friend instead of letting the cart take her body, instead of watching the river overwhelm her.

I thought of Naomi’s little voice, her perfect, lilting Chinese: yao, yao, yao, want, want, want.

“Did you hear that Sally has gone?” she asked, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“The Japanese have attacked the American and British ships! They’re firing from warships and shore batteries—the harbor is on fire. Men are dying! The Japanese army is everywhere!”

The sampans, jetties, and military boats were in an extravagant jumble of chaos, smoke ballooning up and hanging in the sky while pieces of machinery fell from ships: metal, wood, and glass sizzling as it sunk.

My legs were soft with exhaustion, but I arrived back at the bridge, its metal Xs now resembling sinister blades.

Suzhou Creek was still crawling with mud-men, and I looked back at the burnt boats. What incinerated ship could bring my nonexistent mother across the ocean now?

I passed the sentry boxes, where soldiers stacked heavy bags—of sand, maybe—and plates of steel.

A group of soldiers was beating and kicking something, and the giant mass of moving people knew how to part. No one intervened, even though we all knew what they were kicking was a person.

An animal sound of screaming came down then, so loud it disoriented me.

There was no space, no air, not enough water even though we scrounged for bamboo tokens to trade at the water stations.

The parade of days that followed were indistinct from the nights, because we were barely allowed out, and had almost no food, except what was left of our rice, and a few potatoes.

I followed her to an immaculate kitchen and sat across a table from her, from Mr. Takati’s wife.

Wei’s silence was always my worst punishment, and so I rambled on.

I watched the movie again, tasting the meals Mr. Takati had fed me, mixed with words he’d taught me, my own halting Japanese.

Wei gamely climbed into the seat, and I heaved the cart and his body up by lifting the handles, then tipped the rickshaw back and felt some of the weight transfer from me onto the wheels of the machine.

Lizards crawl from her mouth when she speaks, and whatever water she touches elicits serpents.

The rhythm, maybe, of those steps, light clacking mixed with a heavier gait—a Warsaw sound, my parents returning from a night out, coming to kiss us, my mama whispering: “We’re home.”

When Sergo died, Nacek convinced Sergo’s family that he deserved a grand funeral and helped arrange the hearse.

Everything he said he prefaced with Taube, as if he’d consumed her, become both of them.

Soon a stone building rose before us, gray circles across it resembling bubbles without buoyancy, hard and heavy.

I said, “We owe our lives to the protection the Chinese have offered us.”
As if I had conjured her, Shan came down the stairs then, strangely, half falling, covered with dust, blood pouring from her pant leg to her ankle, where the fabric had been torn away.

She hadn’t gone outside once, and her skin, lavender already, was almost translucent.

Lillia Kazcka-Varsh, from Warsaw, Poland, with siblings Wei and Aili Liang, from Shanghai, China, in honor of interned members of the Girl Guides from the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association’s Kadoorie School, performed an acrobatic, dance, and puppet show at the school on Saturday, one that transformed our community’s collective grief into an hour of joy and spectacle, even catharsis.

Ohel Moshe will glow with its silent foyer and rows of benches. Its Aron Kodesh will continue to hold our Torah.