Page 11

Anyu turned around. She had been watching Esther help an older man holding a cane and forgot about the customers entering the shop.

All of a sudden, her confidence in selling jewelry vanished, and she could feel her pulse quicken and her palms grow sweaty.

She wiped her hands on her pants, over and over, willing the customer to go away.

Then, composing herself, she peered at the jadeite earrings and the marked price inside the glass case and said, “Two hundred Chinese dollars.”

The staggering sum was beyond her grasp of understanding. She had never laid an eye on a one-hundred-dollar bill.

“That’s overpriced. It shouldn’t be over one hundred.”

“Yes.”

“You agree?” The man looked surprised.

She nodded. “This price is out of line. This is not jadeite. It’s a fake. One hundred is fair.”

The man shook his head and walked away.

Later, Esther came over. “Did I hear it correctly? Did you tell a customer the jewelry was overpriced?”

“Two hundred is an exorbitant price for a pair of earrings.”

“Exorbitant? Where did you get this idea?”

“This is fake jade.”

Esther’s face turned red, and her eyes glittered. “And you told the customer? Do you always speak without thinking?”

Anyu blinked. Did she?

“Use your brain! Keep your thoughts to yourself, would you? We need to make money.”

Anyu blinked again. Keep your thoughts to yourself.

Later, when the customers came by, Anyu remained quiet and said nothing to contradict the marked prices.

When the customers needed to hold the jewelry, she turned to Esther, who removed the trays and presented them with grace and patience, and when the viewing was over, she locked the pieces away.

Anyu didn’t touch the jewelry and made few remarks about the value of the gemstones or the craftsmanship.

At the end of the day, Anyu failed to make a sale. Standing in the corner of the showroom, she watched Esther and Samuel pack up the jewelry and carry the boxes to a jewelry safe inside the house.

They no longer needed her after closing.

She picked up a damp rag Esther had left for her and began to wipe the glass counter, wondering whether she should explore the city in the evening.

After being in the showroom all day, she wanted some fresh air and to walk the streets—in Harbin, despite the poverty and loneliness, seeing the sky and feeling the openness had always been her favorite thing.

But she was tired, her legs sore after standing all day.

Isaac came into the showroom wearing his black apron. “How was your first day?”

“I didn’t sell anything.”

“That’s all right. Would you mind me asking you something? Esther said you told the customer the jade was fake. How did you know?”

“I just know,” she said and explained the night market where her mother had moonlighted, the conversations she had eavesdropped on, and the gemstones she had spied.

From what she had heard, she could tell if it was real jade by inspecting its color, transparency, and luster.

“Some jadeite has an oily luster, some doesn’t.

Another way is to click the jadeite and listen to the sound, but I haven’t touched a real jadeite. ”

Isaac smiled. “What a surprise. Who would know an orphan growing up by the train station has a talent for discerning gemstones.”

“I won’t tell the customers,” she said.

Isaac nodded and headed to the door behind the curtain.

“Mr. Mandelburg?” she called out.

He turned around at the door. “Yes?”

“Do you still have the egg?”

He froze, his mouth agape. “For your own safety and our best interest, I advise you not to mention it again, Anyu.”

“Why?” The expression on his face, though, reminded her of the blood on his neck when they were at the train station, and his haste to leave. “What happened in Harbin?”

“I would rather not talk about it.”

“But you have to, or I’ll keep asking.”

He shook his head, looking dismayed. “You’re a stubborn kid.”

That was what her mother had often said.

“You might want to take a seat.” He came to the counter, and Anyu set aside the rag and listened.

When he received the egg from the tsarina’s delegate, Isaac said, one of the White Russian guards from the Winter Palace, an unscrupulous man who had already stolen some of the imperial family’s treasure, had demanded the keepsake from him, but he refused and fled.

The guard had hunted him from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and then to Harbin, where he had lived undisturbed in an inn’s cellar with Esther and Samuel.

Until one day, at the crack of dawn, the proprietor warned him of visitors.

Climbing out of the cellar, he could see the White Russian guard and beside him a Japanese officer in the Japanese Imperial Army’s overcoat uniform, a sword in his hand.

He was short, slim, with narrow shoulders.

To keep his grown children from danger, Isaac instructed them to split up and meet at the train station, where they would travel to Shanghai.

He opened the back door to let them out, hurried back to the cellar to gather his leather bag that contained the egg and portable valuables, and raced to the backyard.

He was only a few feet away from the gate when the guard and officer came upon him.

Holding the leather bag containing the egg, he trembled against the wall, next to the body of the proprietor who had warned him, as the deadly pair gestured and growled.

It seemed an argument had broken out between the duo.

The guard flew into a fit of rage, cursing, threatening, and whipping out his pistol.

The officer simply watched, his head bowed, listening like an obedient daughter.

Then the unthinkable: with a blinding speed that Isaac almost believed was his imagination, the Russian guard stopped cursing, the pistol still grasped in his hand—a sword had pierced his heart.

Blood splattered on Isaac’s face, and the yard roared with concerned guests clamoring, shouting, distracting the officer.

Seizing the chance, Isaac slipped through the gate and ran for his life.

When he was far away from the inn, with the killer out of sight, he washed the blood off his face with snow and went to the train station, trudging among the tide of Chinese, Russians, and Japanese soldiers.

But he couldn’t find his grown children at the station.

He would discover later they had left on a different train, but he didn’t know it then.

Worried about their safety, searching for them among the crowds of people, fearful of the officer pursuing him, he didn’t notice how he had lost his fedora and even the bag with the egg.

Sinking into despair, he searched everywhere near the station until he saw Anyu, and to his greatest joy, she returned the bag to him.

“Are you sure it was a Japanese officer chasing you?” Anyu asked.

“I’m sure. His uniform was easy to identify; it had red collar patches and brass buttons set widely apart. Many officers in Harbin wore that type of overcoat to ward off the chill. He also had a crew cut, wore a military cap, and he was very young.”

“And you said he carried a sword.”

“A samurai sword.”

“Do you think he’s still after you?”

Isaac sighed. Anyu understood why he might stay silent. He was a cautious man; with a valuable egg like that, it was safer not to mention it at all.

Esther coughed in the doorway, folding her arms. Anyu had not noticed when she entered the showroom.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt you two,” Esther said.

Very soon, Anyu grew familiar with the routine in the two-story apartment the Mandelburgs lived in.

Each morning, Esther, Uncle David, and Samuel carried out jewelry boxes from inside the workshop that Anyu was forbidden to enter, unpacked them in the showroom, and displayed them in the glass cases.

Isaac, busy creating new wares, rarely joined.

Each evening, at closing, the three packed up, carried the boxes out of the showroom, and stored them in the safe in the workshop.

Sometimes, when Anyu listened hard enough, she could hear the creak of the workshop’s door opening and the metallic clang of the safe.

The apartment was small and musty, with damp walls, a muddy floor, an entrance to the showroom in the front, and a back door to an alley, where the women did their laundry and washed their dishes.

There wasn’t much free space to move around, and it felt cramped when all of them sat together.

There were only two bedrooms on the top floor, the women’s attic chamber and the men’s room across from it.

Being discreet, Anyu didn’t set foot in the men’s bedroom, but once when the door was left ajar, she peered into it.

For someone with a priceless egg, Isaac lived a surprisingly humble lifestyle—the bedroom was sparsely furnished with two beds, two wardrobes, and a chest.

The workshop that Esther forbade her to enter was located at the end of the hallway on the first floor, secured by a brass padlock with a ring handle rather than a Chinese box-style padlock.

On the doorpost was installed a piece of metal, a mezuzah, which the men touched before entering.

Loud thumping and metallic striking sounds came from inside, sometimes even at night.

The smoke from the furnace, the rust and the dust, the acrid scent of metal burning, and the sharp odor of chemicals wafted from the workshop to the kitchen and attic.

Sometimes, when the workshop’s door was left ajar, Anyu could hear Isaac’s frustrated, muffled voice: Samuel, wake up. Where is the chain I asked for?