Someday We Will Fly Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Rachel DeWoskin

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: DeWoskin, Rachel, author. Title: Someday we will fly / by Rachel DeWoskin.

  Description: New York : Viking, published by Penguin Group, [2019] | Summary: Lillia, fifteen, flees Warsaw with her father and baby sister in 1940 to try to make a new start in Shanghai, China, but the conflict grows more intense as America and Japan become involved. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018018516 (print) | LCCN 2018024506 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101617885 (ebook) | ISBN 9780670014965 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—China—Shanghai—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Jews—China—Shanghai—Fiction. | Emigration and immigration—Fiction. | Circus performers—Fiction. | Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945—Fiction. | Shanghai (China)—History—20th century—Fiction. | China—History—1937–1945—Fiction. Classification: LCC PZ7.D537 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.D537 Som 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018516

  Version_2

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Bridge

  Lillia's Journey

  Chapter One: Domu, Home

  Chapter Two: Obcy, Stranger

  Chapter Three: Heime, Home

  Chapter Four: Cmentarz, Cemetery

  Chapter Five: 学校, Xuexiao, School

  Chapter Six: 朋友, Pengyou, Friend

  Chapter Seven: 随跟, Suigen, Fitting In

  Chapter Eight: 女孩导游, Nuhai Daoyou, Girl Guides

  Chapter Nine: 天空音乐, Tiankong Yinyue, Sky Music

  Chapter Ten: 热病, Rebing, Fever

  Chapter Eleven: 华丽宫, Huali Gong, Magnifique

  Chapter Twelve: 跳舞起来, Tiaowu Qilai, Beginning to Dance

  Chapter Thirteen: 饥饿, Ji’e, Hunger

  Chapter Fourteen: 珍珠港, Zhenzhu Gang, Pearl Harbor

  Chapter Fifteen: 然后, Ran Hou, After

  Chapter Sixteen: 见面, Jianmian, Meeting

  Chapter Seventeen: 阿兰卡, A-lan-ka, Alenka

  Chapter Eighteen: 开始, Kaishi, Beginning

  Encore

  Sources Consulted

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  For anyone who has ever needed to leave home.

  And for Shanghai, a haven for so many refugees in the 1930s and ’40s.

  May America be a sanctuary, too.

  — — — —

  The Bridge

  I didn’t believe,

  Standing on the bank of a river

  Which was wide and swift,

  That I would cross that bridge

  Plaited from thin, fragile reeds

  Fastened with bast.

  I walked delicately as a butterfly

  And heavily as an elephant,

  I walked surely as a dancer

  And wavered like a blind man.

  I didn’t believe that I would cross that bridge,

  And now that I am standing on the other side,

  I don’t believe I crossed it.

  —Leopold Staff (1878–1957)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Domu, Home

  In the last act I saw my parents perform, they already looked like ghosts of the Stanislav Circus. It was spring, this spring, May 17, 1940. Alone in low light, they stared at each other for six seconds before my father bent at the knees and took my mother’s hands in his. She stepped onto the bend in his arm and kicked off as he lifted and turned her upside down. He straightened slowly and she rose, her hands atop his, her hair falling into the space between their heads. They were dressed in blue and silver, like liquid or vapor, moving. They stayed, as they had my whole life and I guess even before that, in motion, attached to each other. Papa walked toward the audience, with Mama above him.

  As they came forward, no one breathed. The audience was just a few of their former colleagues from the circus, my silent baby sister, Naomi, and me. Mama’s face was turned away from us, but Papa smiled and in spite of the poor light, we saw his teeth flash, saw the glitter tear painted on his cheek. He lowered Mama so slowly, smiling, maybe feeling the joy they’d decided was worth risking a performance. Even though they were forbidden. They hadn’t performed in so long it felt unbearable. So here they were, although there was no real ring, no antique building, no fiery spotlight. There was no music.

  Their faces met, hers upside down, and then he lowered her more, until she was at his chest, his stomach, his knees. She bent and suspended herself across him, making their bodies a V before rising up again to his shoulders, where she balanced the back of her neck against the back of his. This was their most perfect act, and I waited, squeezing my sister tight, knowing next our father would flip our mother from his shoulders and catch her so surely that her body would look, even in this pitiful place, as certain as an arrow finding its bull’s-eye.

  But everything went black. We heard the cracking of a door kicked open, broken, something slamming across the floor my parents had taped up. There was a chorus of screaming voices, my mother’s among them. I began to scream, too. Someone grabbed me so roughly I didn’t know until I felt the shiny fabric of his blue-and-silver suit that it was my father. He put me on his back, and I held on as he ran into the blank night, gripping my sister under his arm so she wouldn’t slip from his grasp and be lost. We flew to Zgoda Street, where he bounded into the back of our apartment, set us down, locked the door, pulled the blinds, and turned to me, no breath left in him. “She’ll come. We have to wait.”

  I hadn’t asked.

  We waited all night. Naomi cried the way she does, clicking a cricket noise in the back of her throat, exhausting herself and us. There was nothing we could do. Only Mama knows what Naomi wants, and most of the time what she wants is Mama.

  The sun rose and we stared through a tear in the drapes my grandmother had sewn as Warsaw came alive outside. In the day’s first dim light, silhouettes of soldiers moved like shadows. Our non-Jewish neighbors, still allowed to work and study, hurried by. When Naomi finally fell asleep, I turned to my father, wild with fear I saw in his face, too. Why hadn’t he gone back into the night to find her? Was he afraid of vanishing, too? Had he chosen between her and us?

  “Where is she? What happened?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  We had tickets on a train leaving Lithuania for Italy in two days. We were to drive to Lithuania—the four of us—and then take the train to a ship that would sail in six days. Sail to Shanghai, a place we couldn’t imagine. I tried to clear my mind by counting: six days was one hundred and forty-four hours, eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes. That was enough time. She might come back, meet us at home in time to drive to Lithuania, ten hours away, or in Lithuania in time for the train from there to Italy, which took two days. As long as she got to us before we drove, or met us at the train, or found us in Trieste, at the dock. Those were all possibilities, and the more I considered them, the more I felt a good one might come true. I told myself she had climbed down from my father’s arms, skipping the finale intentionally, to escape. I put the screaming outside of my mind and imagined her on her way back, coming through the door, scooping Naomi up, wrapping her arms around Papa’s neck, turning to wink at me. My grandmother, Babcia, would come in singing off-key, delighted. If I thought hard enough, really believed they would be home any minute, there were lots of minutes for God to make it happen.

  All of her bird clocks chimed, and I jumped like a rickety puppet, shocked. It was five in the morning, but we were upside down, our day ending. Papa looked desperately at Naomi. Her cheeks were hot, dark curls stuck to her forehead, and a ribbon of drool glistened down her chin. A wooden cuckoo popped out of our best clock, and I waited for it to slide back to safety, but it stayed frozen, outside. No one else seemed to notice, so I said, “It’s broken, look.”

  My sister didn’t stir. Papa draped a red quilt over her, and then reached down to pick me up, even though I was fifteen. We often carried each other around for fun. My father lifted, threw, spun, flipped, and caught us. I was made for the circus, small for fifteen and bendy. I had always been able to push two chairs close to each other and hold myself up over them, my hands the claws of a limber bird. Naomi was small as well, too small, and when we held her, she slid as if boneless, through our arms. My parents called her their “surprise baby,” even before she behaved in surprising ways, but she wasn’t like other one-and-a-half-year-olds and no one knew why, not my parents, not the doctors, not me.

  But when my father picked me up from the couch, it was a different lifting, as if a switch had flipped and my weight might crack his spine. He hunched over my bed after setting me down.

  “Maybe’s she’s found Babcia,” I tried. “Maybe she found the camp, and that’s why they’re . . . well, they’re coming back together, that’s why—” There was silence until my false, looping voice started up again: “If not, we won’t go. We don’t have to go. We can take a different ship. We can . . .” These were questions, but he didn’t answer and I felt the blood in my limbs go cold and slow, dimming from red to pink.

  “Well, I won’t go,” I told him. I picked up my doll with the faded face, her yarn hair redder than my mother’s or mine. And a mouse Babcia sewed for me when I was three. They were my only remaining toys, but I wished I’d kept every doll and animal, each game I’d ever played, because it came to me that I might never see my life again. Or Warsaw, our glittering Vistula River, Zgoda Park. Our city. Even after the soldiers came and I wasn’t allowed at school, the streets still flashed with color. We were still from somewhere.

  I tried to imagine my mother. Was she running along the river? Almost home, in the park? Was she alone? She was fearless, preferring no net at the circus, securing herself to Papa’s limbs or ribbons hanging from the ceiling. They fought about this often, and he told her over and over to be more careful, but she laughed. Even angry, he stood beneath her, ready to lift her up and catch her, maybe careful for them both. After I was born, he made puppets and taught me to dance; he didn’t like my contortion acts because he thought I might get hurt. But I wanted to be like my mother, brave, so I twirled as fast as a toy top, never got dizzy, bent into the wildest shapes I could make, flipped across every lovely expanse of stage I could find. I was dancing before I walked and everyone called me Wróżka, Fairy, because I danced like someone flying. Mama had her own name for me, though, Słodkie Lillia, Sweet Lillia. Little, silent Naomi we all called Lalka, Doll.

  Now my father said, “Wróżka, I’m going to the circus offices to find out where your mother went. Stay here. Watch Naomi. Do not answer the door. Keep the curtains shut and don’t look out the window. I’ll tell Ana you girls are home.”

  I didn’t want to stay. Or watch my sister. Some drum sounded inside me, formed more words: What do I do with Naomi? What if you don’t come back? The worst fear filled me. Even if I asked questions forever, I could not keep him here. He hadn’t even let me walk to school or Zgoda Park since the soldiers came, but now he was leaving me alone with Naomi after our mother vanished? Now he was kissing my forehead and I saw his eyes, lined with veins like red threads. Now he had become someone else over one night, someone sewn up sloppily.

  I grabbed his hand, but it was cold. The glow around him, a bright clown blue he’d always had, was gone. “Don’t look out the window,” he reminded me. “Stay inside. Keep the lights off. There is food on the counter and some milk in the icebox. Only if there’s an emergency, go get Ana.”

  Ana was my best friend Kassia’s mother, and I didn’t want to get her even though this felt like an emergency already. I listened for Naomi, angry with her for being a baby, for being so strange, for probably waking up soon and needing something I couldn’t guess. Why didn’t she crawl or babble like other babies? Papa used to joke that he loved me better once I learned to talk. But he hadn’t said so in a long time, not since Naomi should have talked but didn’t.

  The clocks ticked like a chorus of clucking human tongues: tluck, tluck, tluck, tluck.

  Our dog, Piotr, climbed up onto my stomach. We’d found him behind a rock at Zgoda Park the winter Naomi was born and even though she didn’t like animals, Mama said it was because I needed someone to take care of that he’d appeared. Naomi would be her baby and Piotr, mine. Mama was fair like that, so she let me keep Piotr. He watched me now, his white eyebrows moving as they always did when he was thinking. “They’ll be back,” I tried to convince him, but he closed his eyes.

  I tried to will it. They’d be quiet because of the soldiers, but I would hear their steps: a slight beat between Babcia’s right and left, my father’s even heels, Mama’s skittery walking. Her bold voice, “Sorry we’re late, Słodkie Lillia.” She would leap on my bed and tickle me, apologizing. “Późno, late, przepraszam, sorry.” She was always late. That’s why my father loved buying her clocks.

  The first time they met, she was late for her call at the Stanislav Circus. It’s my first memory of her, even though it’s not my memory but a story they loved to tell each other and me, how she came running into the Warsaw Cultural Center like a gazelle, long-limbed and elegant except when she was frantic. Then she seemed very silly. She was shedding layers, the felt coat with a wool collar, the scarf Babcia had made her, a sweater. She kicked free of one boot and was struggling with the other, unbuttoning and pulling off her pants just as Papa, not Papa yet, came out of the dressing room, in his clown outfit.

  “Przepraszam!” he said, the first word he ever spoke to her, sorry. She was hopping furiously on her strong legs, in underpants she told me were orange.

  “Nie przepraszaj! Don’t say sorry! Just help me! I’m late!” She flung her things, inside out, all about. “Please,” she gasped. “I’ll be fired before I start! I need this job. . . .”

  Papa stared. He knew the moment mattered, so he snapped alert and dug in the trunk for tights, tape, a leotard she pulled on. They taped up her hands, and she ran into the hallway behind the ring.

  Now my sister was crying, and I snapped back into the terrible day and went to get her.

  “Papa is out, but I’m here,” I said in English. I’m good at English, because Babcia made me read all her books. She never said so, but I knew it was because she wanted to make sure I could do something other than be in the circus when I grew up. In the kitchen, I held Naomi on the counter and fed her some milk and noodles. I said, “Milk,” when she drank, and “Noodles,” while she chewed.

  Then we sat in my room, where time pressed us down, spun us under. Nao mi threw my two toys off the bed, and I picked them up and she threw them off again. She laughed wildly, closing her eyes and tipping her head back the way she does, like she’s drinking whatever is funny and then coughing it back out: zla, zla, zla.

  A wash of light rose outside until my ceiling and walls were bright in spite of the drapes. I stared at the review I had pinned up—of my parents’ act, “intimate, dazzling.” It called Mama “weightless” and Papa “a masterful anchor.” In the photo, she is upside down, her hands atop his. He is looking up at her. Next to that was my poster of Zishe from Stryków, on a ladder, holding an elephant in his arms, and, in his teeth, a rope attached to a wagon full of people. Papa’s hero, he was not only the strongest man in the world, but even better, a Jewish strongman. Zishe rolled into arenas in a chariot covered with Stars of David. He died the same year I was born, 1925, and Papa started wearing the glitter tear. He said I was the only thing that cured the heartbreak of Zishe dying too young. Our circus had so many Jewish acrobats, clowns, and dancers. We played festive klezmer music and our tightrope walkers were sisters whose mother recited tehillim as they walked the wire, her prayers keeping them safe. No one minded Jewishness yet.

  The sun moved higher in the sky and I knew it was midday; when it sank, I knew dusk; and when it disappeared, night again. Naomi finished the milk and then there was nothing left. Despair darkened our apartment, and I began to panic. I carried my sister to the stove, set her down, got on my hands and knees, and scoured the ashes. When my fingers found the ring I’d seen our mother hide, I said out loud to Naomi, “Look. She’ll be happy when she gets home.” But I didn’t believe it, and Naomi didn’t even understand. I washed the ring’s gold star, then tore open the stomach of my toy mouse and sewed the ring in. Naomi watched, the quietest audience member. I finished sewing and stood on my hands.

  “A show for you,” I whispered. But I was stiff and fragile, from being inside too much or from fear. I fell out of my handstand and danced, without music, until I was warmer. Then I lay on my stomach and twisted into a spider, legs over my shoulders, feet in my hands. I smiled at Naomi, but she just stared, her giant eyes unblinking.