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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Five facts about the pufferfish, also known as the fugu in
Japanese:
1. One pufferfish contains the poison tetrodotoxin that is
hundreds of times more
poisonous than cyanide.
2. There is enough toxin in one pufferfish’s liver to kill five
men.
3. Its ovaries, roe and kidneys are just as deadly as the
liver.
4. One milligram of the Pufferfish’s tetrodotoxin is enough to
cause torturous death
within less than 60 minutes of being consumed.
5. After the toxic organs are carefully removed, it is possible
to eat this very delicious
fish raw or cooked.
Just as it’s possible to find pleasure in an otherwise deadly
fish, Japanese government
thought it possible to gain an advantage from someone they
thought to be an enemy—
as long as great care was taken. The Japanese were allies of the
Nazis, yet they also
allowed thousands of European refugees to escape persecution at
the hands of the
Nazis and to enter Shanghai which they occupied during World War
II. Japanese
diplomats in Eastern Europe issued visas to Jewish Europeans as
a direct response to the
Fugu Plan, while others facilitated their safe passage from
certain death out of
compassion.
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Chapter 1
The Bund, Shanghai
(February 25, 1943)
The wide-eyed winter moon gazed across at the two small figures
on the other side of the
Huangpu River. Hundreds of junks dozed and glowed in the moon’s
stare, nodding and
bobbing as the wind blew in from the cold East China Sea. The
river rippled and twisted like
a weary festival dragon through Shanghai and passed the sleeping
Bund.
Tomas and Lukas huddled together, looking up at the notice.
‘We found it. This is it, Lukas. This is what they don’t want us
to know.’
‘Read it, Tomas!’
Each time Tomas opened his mouth to read, the bitter wind
rebuked him; and so
he’d shut it again each time. His tiny teeth chattered inside
his frozen jaw.
Tomas kept his hands warm inside his cavernous pockets and
rubbed the thickest
part of his scrawny legs to warm them. Lukas looked up at his
brother, breathing heavily,
and studied him in the way that a novice studies his master,
eyes intent and squinting. His
body imitated Tomas’s every movement—bony fingers dived into his
pockets and rubbed at
his legs as if he was summoning a genie from inside Aladdin’s
lamp. Their thin braces held up
the threadbare woolen breeches that they’d long outgrown; hand
knitted stockings draped
around the boys’ stick legs that poked out of the top of almost
worn-out boots. They rubbed
the soles of their boots against the stone pavement so that
their toes would not become
solid blocks of ice. There was no room inside Lukas’s boots to
wiggle a single toe; and,
poking out of the toe-end of one of Tomas’s boots was a
throbbing ice block. No matter
what they did, they couldn’t shield themselves from the raw
night air. Without coats, fat
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
scarves and gloves, without proper sealed boots, neither could
keep warm nor protected
from the ferocious weather.
‘I’m so cold? Are you as cold as me, Tomas?’ A quavering voice
snuck passed Lukas’s
lips.
Tomas nodded and half smiled.
Lukas took his tiny hands from his pockets and cupped them to
his mouth to stop
the cold air leaping down into his sick lungs. He coughed a few
times. His cough hacked at
the air like an axe splitting firewood. The wind carried the
hacking sound across the
Huangpu River and it died, or perhaps it took refuge somewhere,
in the freezing night.
At the sound of the cough, fear grew in Tomas and his dark eyes
blackened. He took
his hands out of his pockets and encased tiny Lukas in his arms.
Tomas was almost twice
Lukas’s age and at least twice as big and strong. He hugged him
tight, drawing him as close
as he could so that he could protect him from the wind and from
the Shanghai night. He
looked down at his pale shivering brother, closed his eyes
momentarily so that he could stop
seeing what he didn’t want to see; Tomas shook his head.
He sighed.
‘I wish you hadn’t come. You shouldn’t to be outside in this
freezing weather. Listen
to your cough? It’s much worse.’
‘It’s the same as always. Toma.’
‘And, if Mama and Papa find out, Luka, I’ll get the hiding of my
life. And you might
too.’
Lukas’s eyes, too big for his shrunken face, widened. ‘I’ll tell
them I made you bring
me and everything will be alright, don’t worry, Tomas.’
‘You won’t need to tell them anything. They won’t find out…’
Instead of a defiant
broadcast, Tomas’s rasp trailed off into nothing at all into the
night.
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
A difficult silence grew between the two brothers for a few
moments. Both boys
faced the notice. Lukas knew what Tomas was thinking and he, at
the very same time, knew
the thoughts burning in Lukas.
‘Toma…’ His scratchy voice rubbed against the air just as his
rough trousers chafed
his skin. ‘You know we came to read the notice. We have to know
what it says. Tonight.’
Lukas’s words tugged at his older brother. He waited for some
reassurance that that was
why they had come to the Bund on a bitterly cold night.
‘So…’
‘So?’
‘What does it say?’
Tomas didn’t open his mouth. He bit down hard to make sure not a
sound escaped.
He regretted disobeying his parents, but not because he was
standing looking at the notice.
He didn’t regret disobeying his parents for having an insatiable
hunger for things that only
adults talked. He didn’t regret possessing a thirst to
understand things he didn’t yet
understand. He wanted to be the one to read the notice. He stood
in the freezing cold
watching his little brother get colder and sicker and it was his
fault.
Standing in front of the notice, he had only questions. Not one
answer. Why could
he have not waited till daylight? Why did he have to be so
impatient? Why did he take Lukas
into the terrible cold? Why did he hunger and thirst to know
what he didn’t know?
Why was Shanghai so cold at night?
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Chapter 2
The bedsit on the second floor; noodle shop on the group
floor
Since Tomas and Lukas and their Mama and Papa had disembarked at
the Shanghai docks at
the end of summer, the brothers were confined to their cramped
bedsit at night. They were
not permitted to go out after dark. There were good reasons for
this: Lukas was sick; Mama
and Papa worked long hours into the night; and so Lukas had
become Tomas’s charge for
much of the day and the night.
Their home was a cramped bedsit on the second floor of a rickety
wooden building,
stained by the years that passed since it was built. It could
almost be described as handsome
on the outside, but was worn out and stripped almost bare on the
inside. In the bedsit stood
two small beds and a small table that rested close to the floor.
It was the only beautiful thing
in the room—on first glance—made of slatted wood smoothed and
splinter-free from
hundreds of years of wear. Mama and Papa shared one bed while
Tomas and Lukas shared
the other. Most of the floor was hidden. Obscuring what lay
beneath were small travelling
trunks, fabric bags and string-secured boxes packed with
precious belongings that had
travelled with them for the last two and half years, since
leaving their home in Vilnius in the
terrible summer of 1940.
Each of the floors above the ground floor housed two or three
families and a bath.
Tomas and Lukas and their mother and father lived on the top
floor with two other families,
the Grabowskis and Kaliszs, and a Rabbi. Their parents would
sometimes engage in
conversation with the Rabbi, but the boys never did, except to
mutter something—perhaps
‘Shalom’ or even ‘Hello—almost silently or to nod their heads
and press themselves against
the wall to let him pass. With the other families, they shared a
bath, a little English and a
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
little Yiddish from time to time. They knew only the family
names and the faces of the folk
on the floor below but, every day, would mouth ‘Hello’,
uncertain of any other way to act.
The first and second floors were cold and bare.
The ground floor was a different floor altogether. It had become
familiar, and the
most wonderful place they could ever hope to live above. The
ground floor was occupied
and consumed by a noodle shop. A noodle shop that only existed
in dreams.
In the waking hours they Lukas and Tomas daydream about it and
at night they
could fill their mouths in their dreams. They longed to eat the
slippery noodles bathed in a
steaming heady, savoury soup and garnished with colourful exotic
delicacies they’d never
before seen. As often as they possibly could, they would stop in
the entrance to the back
door. There they would lick their lips and say how hungry it
made them feel—‘I’m hungrier
than I knew’—and that it smelled like nothing else on
earth—‘That smells like paradise.’
Tomas once said, ‘One day when we’re rich, let’s order every
single thing on the menu and
eat till we’re stuffed as full as a pickpocket’s purse, and then
do it all over again.’ It made
Lukas laugh. At other times they would stand at the front of the
shop and examine the
Chinese diners, hoping that one day it might be them perched
behind the fogged up glass.
With every blink, they studied the fine art of noodle eating by
the best noodle eaters they’d
ever seen—the only ones they’d ever seen. Every one of them
would raise their brimming
bowl of noodles right up to their chin and balance it for a
while on one open palm. Then with
the other hand, they would deftly shovel drenched, dripping
noodles into their bulging
mouths as each noodle slapped one or both stuffed cheeks before
being devoured—
vanishing into satisfied bellies. It seemed that Tomas and Lukas
could hear every loud slap
and slurp over the clatter of the kitchen and the chatter of the
noodle shop diners. Every
round face glistened with satisfaction behind the window, each
unaware of the two dark-
eyed Blue Hats* standing on the street outside, watching every
mouthful with hungry
anticipation. On one occasion, the brothers stood in the back
doorway and bravely leant
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
forward to peer in at the magic being brewed, unaware of a
Chinese kitchen hand standing
behind them. “Nong haw. Hia vɛ tɕʰɪˑ.ku.lə va?” (Translate into
phonetic English—‘Have you
eaten?’) He stood with a small bowl of noodles. Unsure of what
to do, the two froze,
muttered the Shanghaiese words of greeting, “Nong haw,” and then
bolted into the
alleyway. And then when there was no sign of the kitchen hand,
they snuck back up the
stairs to the cold, hungry bedsit.
* ‘Blue hats’ is the English translation for the Mandarin word
for ‘Jew’ at that time.
-
Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Chapter 3
Adult business
February 24, 1943
Tomas had woken early and heard whispers through a tiny crack
where the door had not
closed properly. He got out of bed careful not to rouse Lukas
and crept cautiously over to
the door. He put his ear up against the cold timber of the door
and began to listen to the
whispering on the other side. Outside, on the second floor
landing, he could just make out
the murmuring voices of his Mama and Papa, the Grabowskis and
the Rabbi. Tomas knew
that they sometimes gathered on the second floor landing,
sometimes to talk privately and
at other times to schmooze and to gossip—all of which was adult
business.
‘Heime! Heime! Refugees’ quarters for us! Worse than now! In a
ghetto!’ Mr
Grabowski barked with his quietest possible voice.
Tomas could not make out all of his words.
‘Oh, oy vey. It’s in all the newspapers from here to Manila. The
proclamation was
printed in the Shanghai Herald yesterday.’ The Rabbi kept his
ire to a whisper.
‘What has happened?’ My mother and father only read newspapers
that were days,
if not weeks old.
‘Heime! It’s outrageous! We didn’t expect this!’ Mrs Grabowski’s
voice sounded like
it could shatter.
‘And there’s a sign posted somewhere on the Bund, they say. I’ve
heard it says that
all Jews must go into a ghetto. We will have to leave our homes
and our jobs. And once
we’re there, we won’t be permitted to leave again. That’s what
the papers are all saying as
well.’
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
‘Oh, oy vey. How will we live? We have just found regular jobs
now after so long
without them.’ Mama sounded panic-stricken.
‘My dear woman, we will not leave. I for one will not live again
in fear.’ Mr
Grabowski’s low voice filled the stairwell.
‘And poor little Lukas’s lungs are not strong enough to survive
the stress of all this.
People get so sick in the slums. Oh oy vey.’ Tomas could hear
Mama sniffing back tears. He
itched to open the door and comfort her.
‘A heim worse than this?’ The Grabowskis had not seen living
quarters worse than
their bedsit on the first floor. Tomas’s family had.
‘Oy vey! We will not let this happen to us.’ The rabbi’s hoarse
whisper was loud
enough to wake Lukas. Tomas struggled to hear all of the
conversation but what little he
could hear scared him. It made so little sense. He heard heime
over and over.
‘This will only make us stronger Bubalah*.’ Papa had been silent
as Tomas listened
and he willed him to say something that would make it all seem
better. ‘What does the
notice say exactly, Rabbi?’
‘Well, I haven’t read it myself. It only went up yesterday. I
would go today except
that it’s the Sabbath. It’s no doubt what has been written in
the newspaper.’ His voice
softened.
‘You know what the newspapers are like, Rabbi. They exaggerate
everything. And
without seeing the sign for yourself… Surely, if this is true,
we will be told personally. How
many Jews can there be living in Shanghai? Please just let’s
keep our voices down, so that
we don’t worry the children; and let’s try to keep our hopes
up.’
The whispering was about to stop. Tomas turned slowly away from
the door, and
prepared to creep back to bed. There behind him was Lukas.
‘What are you doing? Luka, what did you hear?’ Tomas was
alarmed.
‘Nothing! What does heime mean?’
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
‘I don’t know what heime means. It’s not important, otherwise
they’d tell, wouldn’t
they. Get into bed! Hurry!’ He kept his irritation to a whisper
and jostled Lukas into their
bed.
They scuttled under the covers and pretended to sleep. Under the
covers, their
hearts pounded so fast and loudly, they were sure their Mama and
Papa could hear the
beating. Both their faces were hot and red. Tomas and Lukas
closed their eyes tightly and
prayed that their parents would not know they had been eaves
dropping. They were afraid
of being punished for listening to adult business.
Lukas slept while Tomas lay awake planning his excursion to the
Bund to read the
notice for himself. He had to know about the adults’ business.
He thought he was old
enough to know about such things and to not be protected. Anger
welled up in him as he
thought about what he had heard: the ghetto, the heime, the
slums, another move. He
wanted to be included in conversations about adult business, but
once again he was treated
like a child.
After all, at almost thirteen, he was grown up enough to have
the responsibility of
looking after his younger brother now. Why could he not be
trusted enough to take part in
adult conversations, at least to listen if not to speak?
Tomas’ eyelids fluttered. As he dozed back into a deep sleep his
thoughts left adult
business and the notice and turned to delicious slippery steamy
noodles that would fill his
stomach and warm his heart.
* Bubalah is a Yiddish term of endearment that could be
translated into English to mean
‘sweetheart’.
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Chapter 4
The notice on the Bund
The next night, Tomas crawled out of bed and dressed himself in
silent slow motion, so that
he wouldn’t wake his sleeping brother. He made not one
sound.
Tomas closed the door behind him, careful to mute the grating of
the rusty lock,
knowing that the smallest noise could be heard from inside any
of the three rooms on the
second floor. He stopped for a moment as he remembered his coat,
hat and gloves, but
didn’t turn back to collect them as he would risk waking the
Grabowskis, the Kalisz’s or the
rabbi with the slightest sound of the bolt sliding inside its
rusty latch. He left Lukas to sleep.
Tomas tiptoed passed the rabbi’s room and the communal bath on
the left, the
Grabowski’s on the right and the Kalisz’s at the end of the
corridor. He crept down two
flights of stairs and at the very bottom stopped and turned.
Had he heard a faint coughing?
Tomas snuck passed the back door of the ground floor noodle shop
still belching out
smells that made his mouth dribble and his stomach groan with
longing. He stopped for a
moment to catch his breath. Tomas then turned again.
Lukas emerged out of the misted darkness and coughed a few
times. No coat. No
hat. No gloves.
‘What are you doing here? Would you stop following, just for
once?’
‘I’m coming too—to look at it.’ He coughed again.
‘No, you’re not. We’re going home.’ Tomas took Lukas’s little
hand and tugged him
in the direction of home.
‘We’ll never know what it’s all about if we don’t go.’ Lukas
could read his big
brother’s thoughts. ‘Please let me come. I won’t be any
trouble.’
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
‘You’re always trouble. Nothing but trouble.’
Lukas stood still as Tomas tried to continue on back towards
home. He released
another spasm of barking coughs, as tears became puddles in his
eyes. Tomas looked back at
his brother and then moved close enough to him to see the tears
that glistened in the
meager moonlight. He frowned knowing that what he was about to
say would summon
inevitable regret. ‘Okay then, little brother. But you can’t
breathe a word of this.’
Tomas and Lukas stepped back out into the darkness.
The dim light of the moon illuminated so little of the alley
that the two were
confused at first about where they were. Tomas again grabbed
Lukas’ hand to lead him away
from the dead end of the alley. Lukas’ half-frozen face
smiled.
They continued on towards the Huangpu River and the Bund,
passing piles of
stinking food scraps that spilled out into the dark narrow
alleyway. Steam and smoke from
the back of restaurants and factories made it hard to see where
the alley met the wide
street in the distance. They zigzagged together through the
alley until they reached the wide
footpaths of Szechuan Road.
They couldn’t read the Chinese shop signs but knew this street
well, having been
there many times on their own exploring and with their parents
on shopping days. They
knew the tailor’s shop where their Papa made beautiful suits at
night and sometimes during
the day. Papa and the other Jewish tailors were there, three
flights of stairs above the boys,
working long hours till just after dawn. Tomas and Lukas looked
up and saw the light in the
room through a crack in the curtains. They quickly passed, heads
down, and continued for a
few blocks until the road intersected the Bund, stopping every
now and then for Lukas to
catch his breath and to look for where the sign might be.
During the day, Chinese, Blue Hats and Europeans scurried about
their business
along the broad heaving pavement of the Bund next to the Huangpu
River. Whenever Tomas
and Lukas were on the footpath of this wide boulevard, the
people had been joined by cars,
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
bicycles, trucks, trolleys and rickshaws all pushing and shoving
each other in the sunlight.
Japanese soldiers dotted amongst them all, usually standing,
watching. But at this time of
the night in the winter, especially so soon after the New Year,
the Bund was empty,
unnervingly so.
There they stood, on the other side of the wide Huangpu, Tomas
and Lukas shivering
and breathless. In that moment, the moon, low in the dark sky
with not a star for extra light,
shone directly on the notice.
‘We found it. This is it. Adult business.’
‘Read it to me, Tomas!’
Tomas’s arms wrapped around Lukas. He looked up and each time
his brother drew
breath, Lukas’s hopes rose. But each time Tomas said nothing,
hope faded. Tomas’s words
were frozen somewhere between his thoughts and their
utterance.
‘Read the notice and then we can go home. Come on.’
Still no words came out.
‘Tomas, what does it say?’ Lukas’s lungs rattled as he tried to
take in breath. His
cough was like the bark of a tenacious dog and his skinny neck
poked forward out of his
unbleached shirt collar like, his head bobbing keenly. He could
not read a word in front of
him but he studied it as he coughed hoping the meaning would
jump out at him and he
could go home.
‘It’s okay, Luka, just breathe calmly, and I’ll read the notice
and then we’ll go home.’
In the light of the moon, Tomas squinted at the notice trying to
make sense of the
dark words pasted to the towering brick wall. The words were
written in bold English type—
they were black and unbending against the grubbied white paper.
He couldn’t understand
the meaning of every word in front of him but he could
nevertheless read it aloud and make
Lukas believe that it was all clear to him.
-
Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
‘This is what the adults don’t want us to know, Luka. Are you
sure you want to hear
it?’
Lukas nodded firmly holding in a cough with his hands.
Tomas stumbled over the words on the notice. ‘It says:
Proclamation concerning
restrictions of residence and business of stateless
refugees.
Number one. Due to military necessity, stateless refugees shall
be restricted to east of
Chaoufoong Road; west of Yangtzepoo Creek; north of East Seward
Road; and south of the
boundary of the International Settlement. Number two. Persons
other than these refugees
shall not move into the area without the permission of the
Japanese authorities. Number
three. Persons who violate this decree or obstruct its
reinforcement shall be punished by
death by the Japanese authorities. By order of the
Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial
Japanese Navy. 1
1 Truncated version of proclamation published in the Shanghai
Herald on 18th February, 1943.
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Pufferfish by Jenni Foley
Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize 2014 Shortlisted
Entry
Chapter 5
The Bund, Shanghai
Very early February 26, 1943
‘I don’t understand the notice.’ Little Lukas’s voice had almost
disappeared.
‘Let’s go home.’ Tomas’s voice was emptied of hope; filled with
disappointment. He
clutched one of Lukas’s shivering hands and turned away from the
notice. He took just one
step to head home, then stopped abruptly.
A stubborn barrier stood root-firm in front of Tomas. Lukas took
cover behind him
not knowing what had stopped their journey home.
Neither Tomas nor Lukas had seen a Japanese soldier up so close.
They had dodged
them in the street having heard tales that made them fear a
close encounter. Tonight in the
dim shrouded moonlight, Tomas stood staring up at a Japanese
soldier. Every muscle in his
body went into fearful spasm recalling the many gruesome stories
he had heard since
arriving in Shanghai.
Lukas tugged at his brother’s breeches. Tomas’s hand grabbed
Lukas’s tight to stop
him drawing attention to himself.
‘Futari-tachi, nande kono jikan ni koko de shiteru no? Futari?
E?’
Tomas shook his head.
In stilted English-Japanese the soldier asked the same question,
‘What-su are you
tsoo doing-u, here-u? Tell me! Ima! Now!’
WORD COUNT: 3997 words