S Rozan - Trail of Blood

“I have? Ah.” His stiff fingers worked into a pocket and brought out a key ring. He carefully separated keys, until he found the smallest. “This,” he told Anita. “It sticks,” he added. With a little jiggling-it did stick-Anita opened the box, releasing a swirl of rosewood and age.

Inside, a string-bound bundle of letters nestled on a small book, but the box held nothing else. I caught Bill’s eye; his shrug told me we’d been thinking the same thing. Paul lifted out the book and shut the box. No one spoke while he gazed at the book’s once-rich leather cover, now mildew-spotted and flaking. Then he presented it to me with both hands, the formal Chinese way.

“I’ve waited…” Again, the confusion. “I’ve waited a long time to return this, Mei-lin.” Briefly, his eyes closed.

“I’m very grateful.” I glanced at Anita, who was looking worried. “You’re tired,” I said to Paul. “We’ll go now. Thank you very much.”

“I am tired. Lately I’m often tired. But Mei-lin. You’ll come back?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It was an honor to meet you, sir,” Bill said.

Paul Gilder, his arm wrapped around the box, looked at Bill. “Mr. American Sailor.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If you’re keeping company with Mei-lin, be careful of the general.”

“The general, sir?”

“He’s a dangerous man. We thought… After Mei-lin went to Number 76… Just keep an eye out.”

“Sir? Number 76?”

“Very brave. Mei-lin, you were very brave.” Paul nodded. Lily ran over and leaned into his knee. He looked at her in surprise, then smiled. “Lily.”

“Please,” Anita whispered.

Leaving Paul cradling the rosewood box, Bill and I followed Anita to the living room. She said, “I’m sorry. I was afraid he wouldn’t be much help.”

“He thought I was Mei-lin. Kai-rong’s sister. Do you know what he meant about her being brave?”

“I barely know her name. I told you on the phone, he’s never talked much about Shanghai.”

“Or the Shanghai Moon?”

“That, never. The first I heard of it, I was eleven. My Hebrew School teacher invited Zayde to come talk about the Shanghai ghetto. He said he would if I did research and could give the facts-how many refugees, from where, things like that.” She smiled. “I wasn’t very bookish, and he was trying to help. Anyway, I found a reference to the Shanghai Moon, and that it had been Great-Aunt Rosalie’s. I was a little girl with my head full of princesses, so I loved the idea of a romantic lost gem, but when I asked Zayde he just said it was gone.” She looked through the doorway at her grandfather and her daughter. “He said wherever it was, it was cursed, and he wished it had never existed. He said the important things about Shanghai were the Yiddish theaters and the coffeehouses, that people had bar mitzvahs and seders and lit Shabbos candles for ten years on the coast of China, and I should remember that and forget this nonsense about gems. That he didn’t want to hear about it again.” She paused. “It was the only time he was ever short-tempered with me.”

“So you don’t know what happened when it disappeared?”

“No. The only times I heard it mentioned were when Cousin Lao-li visited. Rosalie’s son. Even then they hardly ever spoke about it.”

“Do you see him often, Chen Lao-li?”

“More often now, since we moved here. He comes for holidays and the kids’ birthdays, things like that. I grew up in California, so when I was little I didn’t see him much. I wasn’t born yet when they came here, he and his cousin, but my big brother used to tease Zayde about how excited he’d been when he got the letter that they were coming. He flew to New York three days early, so if he got delayed he’d still be there to meet them.”

“I wonder why they didn’t ask him to sponsor them?” Bill said. “Instead of C. D. Zhang, whom one of them didn’t know and the other didn’t like.”

“They did, and he tried. But he wasn’t a close enough relative for the INS. So Zayde tracked down C. D. Zhang. I have the feeling they might not have contacted him at all if they didn’t have to.”

I asked, “When did Dr. Gilder come to this country?”

“In 1949. He was one of the last refugees to leave. Very few stayed, but Zayde had been planning to. My father used to say we all could have been Chinese.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Stay on? Well, I suppose he had less reason to, after Rosalie died.”

I stood in Anita’s living room stunned, as though I’d gotten a phone call full of bad news. Not my Rosalie! Oh, Lydia, get a grip! I demanded. You already knew she was gone.

Yes, but not so young! I found myself negotiating. Not so soon! Couldn’t she have had a life of happiness with Kai-rong first, and died a contented old lady?

“Are you all right?” Anita eyed me with concern.

“Yes, I’m sorry.” I drew a breath. “It’s just, I’ve been reading Rosalie’s letters at the Jewish Museum and I got very fond of her. I didn’t know she died so young.”

“I read the letters, too. Zayde donated them around the time Lao-li and Li came to this country. I think I would have liked her.”

“Do you-can you tell me what happened?”

“How she died? I just know it was near the end of the civil war. Those last days are something Zayde absolutely never talked about. Do you think it’s important?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe not to the case, I was thinking. But to me. It is to me.

For a moment, we were all silent. I looked at the book Paul Gilder had handed me. “Do you know what this is?”

“He’s never mentioned it. I didn’t even know the box existed while I was growing up. My father brought it with Zayde’s things when Zayde came to live here, but all he knew was it had papers in it.”

“May I look at this?”

Anita nodded. Carefully, I opened the cover. Flakes of leather drifted off the spine. On thick paper flowed column after column of beautiful calligraphy. The first characters on the first page, twice the size of the others, read, “Kairong is back!”

Back, I thought. From England? Just off the Conte Biancamano?

“Can you read that? What is it?” Anita asked.

“I think it’s a diary. The pages are dated. This first one’s May eighth, 1938. That’s the day their ship docked in Shanghai-Rosalie, Paul, and Chen Kai-rong. Anita, what are the letters in the box?”

“I don’t know. I could try to take a look, but not right now, I don’t think.” Paul, with the box on his lap, was running his hand through a set of bamboo chimes. When he stopped, Lily pointed; when he clattered them again, she laughed.

“If you could, it might help. Anything from that time. And I’d like to try to translate this.”

“I don’t know… What if he asks for it? Now that he’s been reminded.”

“We’ll Xerox it,” Bill suggested. “Then you can put it back. It won’t take long.”

“Well.” Anita smiled. “All right. After all, that he gave to you.”

“Can you really read that?” Bill asked as I got back into the car. We’d spent twenty minutes at the Kinko’s in the mall, and then I’d returned the book to Anita, thanking her profusely and trying not to look like I was running out the door.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.

“Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it’s probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, though Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese.”