Night in Shanghai

7

IN THE WINTER of 1938, north China was split between areas controlled by Japan, the Whites, the Reds, and independent warlords loyal to one Chinese side or the other. The Communist hub was Yan’an, a backward settlement in upper Shaanxi Province. It was carved into dusty loess hills along a sluggish, silt-brown river, but to Song it was a city of gold.

Even as a Party member, she could not just travel to Yan’an and present herself. First she had to go to Xi’an, which was in the White area, Chiang’s area, yet functioned as a neutral portal for anyone who wished to pass into Communist territory as a partisan. Song was coming on her own, without written introductions; she knew she would be expected to remain in the hostel of the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office for a few weeks while they considered her. Operations were tighter in the north, it being a military center, while the Party in Shanghai was really a propaganda organization. Maybe she should have written to Chen Xing for his help after all.

The taxi came within sight of the rambling complex of buildings, and she told the driver not to stop, since ahead she could see a Buddhist pagoda, rising above the low-slung courtyard buildings. “There,” she said. One hand strayed to the tiny sewn-in pouch she had carried all the way from Shanghai; it would not do to take twenty-seven diamonds into the Eighth Route Army Office.

She had told no one, and she felt especially bad about keeping the secret from Thomas, but it was only for now. She would pull out the little pouch someday and show him. Right now, though, it had to be put someplace safe.

She walked a while with her travel-bundle, scanning the featureless stone walls. There was no hiding place, not even a small park where she could knock loose enough earth to make a hole under a rock.

She walked back to the pagoda to pray at the temple, and think. After dropping some coins into the earthen pot, which earned an approving gaze from the bald saffron-robed monk at the altar, she lit a clutch of incense sticks and bowed and then sank low, arms outstretched, hoping for an answer. After a minute she stood, and added her incense sticks to the others burning in the dish of sand.

“Sister,” said the monk, “you look tired. I must leave for a dot of time, but remain here if you like. See? There is a small meditation chamber. You may rest there.” And with the serene purpose of his kind, he left.

The temple was unheated, but it was positioned to give shelter from the winds, so she passed gratefully through the door, and found herself in a smaller room, a sort of side chapel, with a tiny window giving onto a grassy back court. Looking out, she saw the court was crowded with a miniature forest of steles, all erected and inscribed over the centuries in honor of the Buddha; she counted twelve of them along with a gnarled tree, limbs naked now in the February cold. The walls were high, no one could see into the courtyard. Was this the open door, the key, the escape hatch? She did not want to cross the threshold of the Eighth Route Army Office unless she had a way to get back to Thomas. She slipped out and began a search of the walls for a loose tile or stone.

Half an hour later she was back on the street, unencumbered. The package that had seemed to burn a hole in her chemise was gone, she was free, light. She walked into the liaison office like any other believer, shoulders square and purposeful.

When she stepped in, she felt she was slipping back in time. The windows were paned in rice paper instead of glass, filling the room with a milky light, and the only telephone was the old cup-and-cord type. Everyone wore loose trousers and a pajama-style tunic, belted at the waist.

Her plain, long skirt, low boots, and layers of padding against the cold had been carefully chosen to look neutral and proletarian, but suddenly seemed carelessly rich, and attracted stares.

From behind the main desk, a heavyset older woman with a close-cut cap of graying hair gave her a form to fill out. Song reached for the cheap bamboo pen and dipped it in the ink as she scanned the onionskin page. It was easy enough to write her name, and give the details of having been sworn in and commissioned as a member of the Shanghai branch, but there was no space to list anything else. She added a neat, modest note about her language abilities at the bottom and handed it back. The woman stamped it with no expression, and waved her on.

No one asked her about her skills, not even the leader of the temporary work unit she was assigned to the next day. They worked in the laundry, washing the linens and uniforms of the officers. She washed her own tunic and trousers down on the banks of the muddy Yan River with a lump of soap and a rock, but the officers got starch and steam ironing. She didn’t mind, and ignored the blisters that formed on her hands and only half healed overnight before opening again the next day.

Nights were the hardest. As soon as she crawled into her cot, beneath the blankets, her dreams were her own again, and she could close her eyes and be with him. Every night they had spent together unfurled in her, and she kept herself awake with it for hours before falling asleep. In the daytime, he receded, a pleasurable secret.

She soon realized that now she was thinking about him the way, in her old life with Du, she had thought about the Party; he had become her private world. As she looked around, she saw young men here, Chinese men, partisans like herself, but she was not drawn to any of them. Her private world was better.

Almost as a challenge to herself, she cut her hair short in the Party style, and let her face become sunburned for the first time ever. Some of the women with good figures could not resist cinching shiny leather belts extra-close around their waists, but Song wore her tunic loose and her hair stubbornly uneven.

In the evenings she attended a newcomers’ class at the Party’s informal school. There she expected to read Marx for the first time, or discuss Party ideology, but instead found herself pressed by questions about Shanghai. Everyone seemed suspicious of a city whose people all came from someplace else and thus had no real home, and would never commit. This was not exactly true, for almost all Shanghainese, including the wealthy elite, still identified emotionally with their clan seats in the provinces, and even made occasional nostalgic visits to their family tombs and lineage temples. Still, the other young recruits in her class all agreed that the city was a place of spiritual pollution, a da ran gang, or giant dye vat so powerful that even jumping into the Huangpu could not clean off the stain-this was the view of Shanghai in traditional China, and here in the class, she was Shanghai’s representative. She learned to say little. Such old-fashioned ideas showed Song that in their own way the Reds were just as fundamentalist as Du and Chiang and the Nationalists, only with a different orthodoxy.

At the same time, in other ways, the place was genuinely progressive. She was accepted, made welcome, and given work, even if it was in the laundry. She saw that the other women in her dormitory were grateful to be here too. They were young and, unlike her, mostly not well educated; all were first-timers who’d had no prior contact with the movement. As the days passed and she heard a little about their lives, she realized they were all running from something-one escaped an arranged marriage, another an enslaving mother-in-law, a third the Japanese. They were not so much true believers as girls who had made a dash for their freedom, and all of them, including Song, had found refuge.

One day in early spring she heard shouts and ran out to the side of the building. Singing! And then from around the corner marched a group of students, in step, twenty or thirty boys and girls wearing bright kerchiefs and rucksacks, all singing in three-part harmony.

“They have walked all the way from Chongqing,” said the girl standing next to her, drying her hands on a towel.

Song gasped. “That is at least a thousand li!”

“Plenty of time to practice,” the girl cracked.

As the students marched up the broad street toward the Liaison Office complex, they sounded to Song like a fleet of angels, pure and high. Everything felt squared inside her at that moment, sure and true. Even her feelings for Thomas did not seem to pose a problem.

Walking back into the laundry, still floating on her optimism, she was stopped by the head of her unit, who handed her an envelope. “Your orders,” he said.

Finally. Please make it Yan’an, the nerve center, the real headquarters-her fingers shook with anticipation as she tore it open, and then her brain seemed to stall. “Chen Lu Village?”

“Time for you to learn from the peasants,” he said.

Thomas had prepaid the rent on his studio until February 1, 1938, and then he lost the room. The piano had to go, since he could not pay to move it, and it felt almost like having an arm or leg taken off to close the lid on those keys for the last time. A piano had been there waiting for him, on the floral rug in the parlor, before he was even born, and now, for the first time, he would have to be without one.

As he would have to be without her. He had known she would go north, had been able to see it in the way her suitcase sat by the bed. But it left a hole in him that never closed.

Luckily, the need to find someplace cheap to live took his mind off her absence. He set himself to scouring the ads in the Shanghai Times, and there found a tingzijian, a pavilion room, which was really only a closed-off loft above some other room, an eight-by-ten box with a single small window.

He had learned about pavilion rooms a year before, his first winter in Shanghai, when he was walking during Chinese New Year with Lin Ming. They had met an acquaintance of Lin’s, and stopped for the two to have an exchange in Chinese before walking on.

“What did he say?” said Thomas.

“He said, ‘May you become a second landlord this year.’ Everyone says that at New Year’s.”

“What is a second landlord?”

“A man lucky enough to lease a house and carve it up and rent every room out to other people. Usually the second landlord will live with his wife and children in the kitchen, or the largest bedroom, or the main parlor. And every other corner will be rented, including the little lofts, which are always the cheapest places.”

Thomas’s new building lay in an alley off a leafy stretch of Route Louis Dufour, and his room hung above the kitchen, in which there lived a family of four, the Huangs, his “second landlords.” The loft-cubicle came with one meal a day, and just as he had done when he moved into the studio, he used a considerable part of the money he had remaining to pay his rent out far in advance, so he could guarantee at least his room and the one daily meal, because he wanted to wait here for Song.

Ensconced, he covered the city looking for work, and ate the rest of his meals on the street, parsing out his coins to the vendors who sold hot, sustaining soups of noodles and meat and vegetables, and the large pan-crisped, sesame-bottomed pork buns called sheng jian bao. Once a week he put on one of his useless suits and walked to Ladow’s Casanova to see Alonzo and Charles and Ernest. That was always a happy hour, talking with them while they set up.

But his cash was disappearing. He spared a few coins every Wednesday morning to get an early copy of the Shanghai Times on the day the new employment ads came out, but there were really no clubs left, at least not any that he could play in.

The Badlands, between Yuyuan and Jessfield and Great Western roads, could not even be considered. The Japanese had forced foreigners out of their mansions and then turned them into vice clubs, just as they had done with the Royal. They filled the ground floors with gambling tables and roulette wheels, constantly jammed with customers and patrolled by guards bristling with guns. Everything else was divided into curtained cubicles for smoking opium, or for sex. Thomas noticed the thick haze and the sweet-sick smell when he walked through midlevel places like the Celestial and the Good Friend. The smell hung in the air even at the top club, the Hollywood, a huge low-ceilinged labyrinth of drug dens and gambling halls into which ten thousand Shanghainese streamed every day and night, from motorcars and rickshaws that clogged the streets all around. But there was no serious music.

The rest of the city was unstable, even though the battle was well in the past. The resistance fighters and collaborationists were still attacking each other by bombing the offices of newspapers and magazines, and assassinating anyone who took too strong a position. One day in February, walking down Rue Chevalier, Thomas saw a human head hanging from a lamppost, eyes wide in terror, staring right at the Frenchtown police station. He could not read the note beneath it, but soon learned that it said “Look! Look! The result of anti-Japanese elements,” and that the head belonged to Cai Diaotou, who edited a society tabloid. Policemen who investigated the decapitation received human fingers in the mail, and soon other severed heads started appearing around Frenchtown, with warning notes. Still, he had to go out, to look for work, or he would starve.

He tried the pit orchestras at the theaters, film studios, and recording studios, and answered ads for rehearsal and accompanist work. He went to every open call for a piano player, and found them crowded with applicants, classically trained like him, many of them very high level, and all of them Jewish refugees.

He waited for his turn on a long bench next to a man from Vienna named Eugen Silverman. “We came on the Lloyd Triestino Line from Genoa,” Silverman said, “and for one whole month we could not leave the ship. Bombay, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong-all the other passengers could come and go, not the Jews. It’s like a punishment from God. No country will take us. Not even for a few hours.”

“Except Shanghai,” said Thomas.

“Thanks to God. Even though they only let us leave with two hundred Reichsmarks, we are here.” Silverman’s name was called, and he went into the little room where they had heard the pianists play short excerpts, one by one.

His playing sounded exceptionally good to Thomas, bright and professional, and when he sight-read the selection they gave him-for every man was given two pages of some piece to test his reading-he played with assurance. Yet when he came out, his babyish face, with its soft round features and blond eyebrows, was long and gray.

“Truly?” Thomas said. “You sounded excellent.”

“Look what they have to choose from,” Silverman said, waving at the long line of pianists. He slumped back down in his seat, and even through his overcoat Thomas could see the hollowness in his upper chest, and the skin loosening beneath his chin, and in one of those intuitive instants he had come to trust, he knew the man had been going hungry.

“Thomas Greene?” said the woman in the doorway.

He gave Eugen a squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ll get the next job,” he said. “You play beautifully.”

Thomas did not do any better. When he was done, they crossed his name off and dismissed him.

To his surprise, Eugen Silverman was still outside, waiting. “No?” he guessed when he saw Thomas’s face. “Ach, they are looking for a God, not a man.” He stood and brushed at his overcoat, which Thomas saw was worn, and had been mended. I looked like that when I first came here. Now his clothes were handmade, of the finest cloth, but it meant nothing.

They left the studio and walked up Zhejiang Road toward the Grand Shanghai Hotel. “Come with me, Eugen. I know a street cart not far from here with very good noodle soup. I have a few coins. Let me buy you a bowl.”

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to-”

“Come,” Thomas said again. He led him north to Taiwan Road, until they came to a small corner between two buildings where great puffs of steam rose into the air and a huddled mob of hungry patrons crowded the small tables, all eating noodles. “Sit,” said Thomas, “it’s restorative.” And he paid the vendor for two bowls.

Song’s orders took her to Chen Lu Village, to learn from the peasants. There, the peasants were all ceramics artisans, because Chen Lu was a village that “ate pottery”-in addition to farming the terraces on the repeating hills, everyone worked in clay. Even the houses were made of discarded pots, from whole urns stacked up, to shards and tiles cemented together; some houses were even built in hive shapes, like kilns. People told her she was lucky to be sent there in winter. With all the kilns running, she would at least be warm. She tried to feel swept up in it, but it was not why she had come north. She longed to go to Yan’an.

As she set out in a bouncing, clattering flatbed truck with a group of students from Zhengzhou, she reminded herself that she needed improvement. The students put her to shame with their joy and fervor, and after all, the job they were going to do-dig a new set of terraces on land that had slid in the rains of the previous autumn-was worthwhile.

By the time they came within sight of the town, belching wood-fired kiln smoke into a hazy sky from a string of denuded hilltops, the winter sun was sinking, and the temperature plummeting. As hunger ate at them, they passed houses tantalizingly strung with corncobs, or fronted with tall heaps of drying kernels on the ground, their color leaching away in the fading light. The truck stopped in front of two hives at the top of one of the hills, and was gone almost as soon as they had clambered down, clapping and stamping, into the cold. The hives, one for men and one for women, were as dark and cold as the outdoors, but they soon had the hearths blazing and a minimal meal of mush made from boiling dried corn and millet. The next day, they would approach the locals for vegetables and oil and salt, maybe some pork. The women slept in a huddled row that night, and Song lay on her right side, warm and safe within the accordion-line of bodies. When she woke up the next morning, someone was singing.

It took only a few days to see that there was no man in the group she cared to know any better, and she was embarrassed for having even thought of it. She would return to Thomas when the time was right. Now she had to learn from the peasants.

She loved many things about Chen Lu Village, the way the sun rose red over the hills, as if lifted by the screaming of roosters; the perplexed gratitude of the older potters when the students restored their families’ grain fields; the warm feel of the women’s hive at night; and the faces of the students by firelight, singing the songs they had learned. It was always in choral style, always about “we” and “us,” marching forward. Song recognized it as the same sound made popular by the moving picture soundtracks that had come out of Shanghai’s film studios all through the magical time of Night in Shanghai. It was in the left-wing style of composers like Nie Er, who had written the popular “March of the Volunteers.” This was the music of the movement, and it was while singing and shoveling dirt all day on the terraces of Chen Lu Village that Song first really heard it and understood it. From the earliest years of her piano lessons with her tutor, to the rapture she had felt hearing Thomas play, she had always loved the music of the West. When she left Shanghai to come north, she had consciously put at least this one foreign-tinged part of her away. But there in Chen Lu Village, digging in the fields and singing beside her fellow believers, she felt music come back to her, in a different way. She added her voice, high and soaring, and they liked it. Thomas would approve. When they came to the end, the others smiled and congratulated her, and she thanked them, but she never forgot that he was the root of her scale. Many nights, she lay thinking of this.

During their last week in the village, one of the men, a dominating personality named Zhu Hongming, moved uncomfortably close to her as they were digging a terrace. He was a leader; she had seen how the other students deferred to him, and how he preened in response. “I have been watching you, Little Sister. You have promise.”

Even to Song, who had little experience with men, it was offensive. She emitted a polite monosyllable.

Mistaking her reserve for self-effacement, he pushed ahead. “It’s so. Your political statements show intelligence.”

She stared. Not a single political statement had escaped her lips. It had taken only a short time in the north for her to see that the safest thing, especially while doing manual labor, was to keep her head down, say nothing, and attract no attention.

“I can help you advance,” said Zhu Hongming, his face dotted with blemishes which he had picked at until they bled. “I am well connected.” He touched her leg.

She winced and pulled back.

“I know a lot of important people in Yan’an. I am high level. I can help you”-his hand came back to her thigh-“or I can block your way.”

She snatched up her shovel and held it poised, point down, above the offending hand, which instantly vanished. How dare he speak to her as an inferior? He was a mere child, no more than twenty-one, while she, an old woman of twenty-four, had already been bought, sold, and reborn. “Don’t ever do that again,” she spat, and took her shovel with her to another row. Effortlessly, without even having to think about it, she had made a decision: enough of trying to climb on her own. Her first day back in Xi’an, she would write Chen Xing a letter.

By May, Thomas was down to his last few Shanghai dollars. For weeks he had been allowing himself only one small meal a day in addition to his dinner with the Huang family, perhaps a bowl of noodles like the ones he had shared with Eugen Silverman, or a large bun like a sheng jian bao. He went on combing the ads, moving quickly from the newspapers and magazines that had been bombed out of existence to new ones, and taking himself to every open call. He failed every time, sometimes even fumbling notes. He never practiced anymore, never played, never touched a piano except to audition while faint with hunger. But there was no help for it, especially after he had spent his last coin. When not at tryouts, he passed most of his time either walking or stretched out in his room, not wanting to impose too often on Alonzo and Keiko.

It was the rituals of the Huang housewife below him that became his clock and kept him tethered to life. First thing in the morning, she did not cook, but went out to the sesame cake store, that fundamental fixture of the Shanghai neighborhood, and brought back fried dough sticks, glutinous rice cakes, soy milk, and sesame cakes, which she had once told him were the “four Buddha’s warrior attendants” of a local breakfast. He watched entranced as they consumed these wonders. She bought everything fresh, all day long, buying just enough noodles and wrappers at the rice store, or sending an older child out to buy one or two cents’ worth of hot pepper or vinegar at the soy sauce store. She never kept any kind of food. She bought briquettes and coal dust almost every day, and used a paste made from water and coal dust to seal the smoldering fire in after warming the room and making tea with it in the morning, in this way keeping it alight until the evening meal. His loft cubicle was pleasantly warm as a result, though he knew with its one tiny window, it would be unbearable in the heat.

He let his mind go to Song. She was like a locked room inside him, waiting. On days when she held his attention, she was everywhere, leaving a trace of her voice in the laugh of a woman down in the lane, or a note of her fragrance in the air. He let himself drift in and out of the past as if he was slipping in and out of consciousness.

Yet he had also promised her he would stay alive, and when summer bloomed warm and humid, and he found himself weakening, he roused himself to one last audition. It was for a ramshackle club in the Chinese city that played Yellow Music, the popular local song form that combined singing styles dating back to the last dynasty with jazz and dance songs brought over by the orchestras from America. It was melodically different, with Chinese lyrics; he could never have even auditioned had there not been a written score on hand, which there was-and though it was a strange hybrid, he played it better than anyone else who showed up that day. As Buck Clayton had once remarked to him about Yellow Music, if it can be written, it can be played. He got the job.

The club was called Summer Lotus, and as soon as he got his first week’s pay, he went looking for Mr. Hsu to write everything out for him. He found the copyist still living in the same tiny tingzijian, with the same piled-high manuscripts, and happy to take the work. Soon, Thomas had all the songs in written form, and was able to keep up.

The club was the kind of place he would never have thought of even entering before. It filled every night with prostitutes and their clients, the latter exclusively Chinese, the prostitutes a regular League of Nations-Russian, French, Ukrainian, and girls from South America and India with long, silky waves of black hair. There was even one who wore the facial veil of an Arab, though he had no idea if it was her native costume or some sort of erotic stunt. So much here was a stunt.

He led the band every night through the summer of 1938, five Chinese musicians including the sinuous singer who carried every song. She did her numbers standing still, her little wrists held out before her in supplication and her small, childlike hips swiveling in plaintive time. The men who came into the club sat at the dimly lit booths all around the wall with their hands up under their dates’ skirts, the women blank, bored, unless they were being paid enough to make sounds of pleasure. They were his audience, the ones he played for, because their lives were as hard as any he had seen, despite the fact that they chattered and laughed together like schoolchildren.

One September night at the club, they were in the middle of a song called “Lovely Peach Blossom,” a Shanghai standard made famous by Fan Zhang and ably delivered by their seductive singer, even if she was a little thin on the high notes, when the sudden rise of sharp, frightened voices and the crash of a door being kicked in made the music falter.

Thomas signaled the band to keep playing. A few couples still tried to move to the music, but others clutched each other and backed off the floor. Thomas kept the rhythm going, and the singer bravely started the next verse.

But then Chinese toughs tumbled in, pistols waving. Thomas sat dumb on his piano stool, even as the other musicians evaporated like smoke from the stage.

The hostesses were fast disappearing through the exits. One of them, Abeya, a dark-skinned girl from Calcutta who always wore a silk sari and her hair in a glossy braid down her back, saw him frozen there and yanked him off the stage.

“What are they looking for?”

“Resistance music. Hurry!” She dragged him through a short rear hall, and into the fresh cool air of the alley. “They will kill you.”

“Resistance? I thought we were playing love songs.”

She had already hitched her sari partway up her waistband, freeing her slender brown legs to the knees, and now took off running. He plunged after her, darting through the shadows along the back walls of houses. From behind came shouts and cries from the club, and pops of gunfire.

A block away, they slowed down to a walk, breathing hard.

“You must never go back there,” she said.

“They owe me half a week’s pay! And what do you mean, resistance?”

“The songs are Chinese to you, you just play them. But some of them are leftist, and they say China must fight. ‘March of the Volunteers’? It’s from a moving picture, Sons and Daughters of the Storm. Nie Er wrote that song-people think of him as a martyr. Yet you play it every night. That’s why the raid.”

“I never knew what it was about.”

“Now you do. Never go back.” As she spoke, she twined her hand in his.

His heart rose inside him, right out of the humiliation and loss that had become like a dark cave to him, a place where he was used to living, and hiding from the world. Song was his angel, but she had fled. Abeya was strong and dark and long-limbed; when they ran, it was she who had set the pace. Now she was radiant from exertion, and the warm spicy smell of her enveloped him. Even if she only pitied him, he didn’t care. He stepped closer, his heart thumping in her direction. “Do you have a place we can go?” It was blunt, but there was a war raging, and manners seemed to belong to a different time.

She took him to a small room in the Chinese City, up two narrow flights, beneath a dormer. An intricately carved wood-lattice screen covered the single window, but let in the cool night and the predawn sounds from the twisting lane outside. She shivered, and shook a soft, long-used blue blanket out over the bed.

“I want to sleep,” she said, and he said he did too, but when he unbuttoned his pants and slid them down and climbed in beside her she turned to him, and opened the strings to her nightdress. He let out a sob of joy, and she laughed as she wrapped her strong legs around him. She was so physically frank, not like Song, whose every touch had carried a world of feeling. But now Abeya was pulling her nightdress over her head, and he was grateful, giving thanks even for the raid that sent him here, though it meant the end of the job at Summer Lotus. When they were done, he turned his head slightly against her neck, and saw that her eyes were open, staring vacantly at the ceiling.

It was early afternoon when he woke up, the light and shadows filigreed on the wall through the wood screen. She was gone; nothing remained of her but a sweet depression where her body had been. He smoothed it with his hand.

He found a note: I regret there is nothing in the cupboard for you but a few biscuits. Please take what you like. I am never going back to Summer Lotus and you should not either. You can come back here, though. Knock and see if I answer. This time was between us. Next time, bring a gift.

He studied her childish looped handwriting, convent handwriting. For the first time he thought about where she had come from, and what she had done to get here. Trying to find her freedom, as he was. Thank you for saving my life, he wrote underneath her message, meaning it in every possible way. She was not Song, but she had extended her hand, and every inch of him appreciated it. Because of her he stepped out into the daylight safe, rested, satisfied by a woman, ready for the long walk home.

Lin Ming managed to save 900 dollars more in the first nine months of 1938, bringing his total to 3,200-still not enough to buy Pearl. Disappointment burned through the scalding cups of tea he downed on the train back to Shanghai, trying to sort out what to tell her. What he really wanted was to take her arm and walk her out of there, watch her give back the furs and silk brocade jackets and dangling earrings of jade and gold filigree; they would leave side by side in their plain cotton clothes. Then he would buy her a set of simple silver wedding bracelets, which he would have incised with their names alongside the dragon and phoenix, entwined in eternal dance.

They could not live in Shanghai; her past would be known to certain people. Instead he would take her to Hong Kong. In doing short jobs for Kung throughout 1938-the fastest way to get money for Pearl-he had seen the vibrant thrum of life in the streets. He loved looking across the bay from Kowloon at Central’s skyline of graduated modern-style buildings in pale stone. He and Pearl could live there, have children, and start a new dynasty, with the name Lin, which had been his mother’s name. Take that, Teacher.

But when he was with her, as he was the first night he arrived in Shanghai, he did not tell her all this as she lay in his arms. Surprising her was part of his plan. For now, he just told her to leave everything to him, that he would make it happen. He told her he did not want to die with his eyes open-regretting work undone and promises not kept-and so she could depend upon him. Her eyes shone at these words.

At noon the next day, the time he had paid for came to an end. They embraced long and hard, and he made haste to the address in Frenchtown where he was to meet H. H. Kung.

Since January first Kung had been serving as Premier of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, which was now located in Chongqing; as such he had been obliged to slip into Shanghai very discreetly, and seek lodgings in a back lane. Lin arrived to find a shikumen house, which literally meant stone-wrapped gate because of the stone lintel that was common in Frenchtown doorways. He would never have suspected this place sheltered anyone special or important. He knocked.

The door was opened by Kung’s secretary, a purse-lipped and overly fastidious man who always wore an old-fashioned gown and vest. “Dr. Kung is upstairs,” he said, and led the way.

“Duke Kung,” Lin said with pleasure, when he saw the older man behind his fog of cigar smoke.

“Young Lin.”

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“Of course. You said you needed some help?”

“Well”-Lin knew Kung was a busy man-“it’s like this. We have known each other a long time, and I am asking if you have any additional work for me. I need money, you see. It’s for the girl I want to marry.”

“Ah!” Kung’s face lit along with the lighter he flicked open to get his cigar going again. “I approve.”

“Thank you.”

“Let me look around. You were in Hankou, too, recently, doing work for Du, I heard.”

“Yes. At the end of April I translated for his interview with two writers from England, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. He told them he worked full-time for the Red Cross.”

“And they believed it?”

“Utterly.” They laughed at this, and then sat in companionable silence, built on years of unspoken alliance and a shared understanding of the world. “Any news from Germany?”

“It’s bad. Jews had to turn in their passports at the beginning of this year. There are new laws-Jews can no longer be in real estate or banking, they cannot be doctors. Cannot teach or study.”

“What about your friends?”

“Dead.”

“Dead! How?”

“One was shot, on the street in Geneva, where he had fled. The other was doused with petrol on the street in Hamburg, and set alight.”

Lin placed an involuntary hand over his midsection. “How awful.”

“Yes.”

“It must have shattered you.”

“Yes. And they were powerful. They ran banks, they were rich, prominent men. If they could not escape it, no one can.”

“Is no one doing anything?”

“I know of one man,” said Kung. “My friend Ho Feng-Shan, in Vienna. He was just promoted to Consul. He has been writing visas to Shanghai as fast as he can dip the pen. They are phony, of course, but they are getting people out of Austria. And if these people don’t escape, they’ll be killed! You know that, don’t you?” He dropped his head, defeated, and ground out his cigar. “Germany won’t stop until all the Jews are dead.”

The money from the job at Summer Lotus did not last long, but it got Thomas through to the end of 1938, and restored his health. He had not wanted his old bandmates to see him growing thin, but now he resumed visiting them several times a week at Ladow’s Casanova. They noticed nothing. Neither did Lin Ming, who had come through town in October to see his lady friend and attend his discreet business meetings.

But now it was January 1939, and his money was gone again. Thomas conserved his strength, staying home, blessing the warm, prepaid room with its one meal a day. He lived in a world of sounds, and knew every voice in the building. In the first-floor parlor lived a policeman with a wife and two sons, and the dining room housed an older man who was a moneylender for the peddlers in the neighborhood. The kitchen was occupied by himself and the Huang family. In the upstairs parlor was another pavilion room, rented by a struggling actress in Chinese opera, and the main bedroom was let to a sailor and his wife. He was away for long periods at sea, and she was what the other tenants called half-open, meaning she took money from men while he was gone. The other rooms were rented by an opium-smoking woman in her thirties, and a trio of Suzhou girls who worked as taxi dancers. Sometimes he lay in bed and listened for their echoes through the walls, and let their voices conjure Song, feeling the line between dream and reality grow thinner.

The high point of the day was his meal, after which he and the Huang family remained around the table while they played a game of listening to a different radio station every night for one hour; though they lived in a fallen city, most stations seemed miraculously to continue broadcasting. Their original idea had been to get news about the war by starting at the bottom of the dial and ticking the knob up through the bulletins and speeches in many languages. They did that, but they quickly heard an amazing variety of music, too, and agreed to keep listening. They enjoyed Hawaiian steel-string guitars, classical composers, French chansons, Cantonese opera, polkas, Russian marches, kunqu opera, and everywhere jazzy Chinese pop songs, the Yellow Music he had played at Summer Lotus.

One night in February they happened on an all-Bach chamber performance by German orchestral musicians who had escaped and reassembled here in Shanghai, broadcast live from the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkou. He knew there were close to twenty thousand Jewish refugees in town now, and so he was able to hear in it a particular kind of blues, a precise and elegant variant on the theme of survival. At the same time he realized they had brought with them a part of home, for Bach was theirs too, no matter how the Germans reviled them. Something lifted in him that night, as he saw he could lay claim to any music he played, no matter where it came from. It was the defiant Bach from the Ohel Moshe Synagogue that made it clear. And in time, as they went up and down the dial, he began to imagine music of his own.

For the first time in his life there were no keys on which to repeat the past, so he let it all go. He had no songs to play, no style to imitate, nothing to do but listen, and he let his mind improvise, his hands moving quickly as if across the keys. He did not play, he only heard. He had become a musician of pure thought, straight invention. Music unspooled within him, new melodies, urgent with feeling, shaped and structured. He sat every evening with the Huang family in their kitchen listening to the radio, while his hands played over his thighs and his mind reached out to dream around the world.

Lin was called back to Shanghai in March, for a meeting with Dr. Kung. He went to the address he was given, a different shikumen lane house this time, off Mandalay Road, in the consular district. The same secretary answered the door. The rotund Kung emerged right behind him, and instead of inviting Lin Ming in, he quickly donned his own overcoat and stepped outside. “Let us take a walk,” he said, something he never suggested.

On the street they spoke of Kung’s family and Lin’s father as they crossed Bubbling Well Road, and at the right moment, walking in the net of lanes between Carter and Da Dong roads, Kung said, “I have a job for you.” He looked around. “But we have to speak privately.”

“There,” Lin said, pointing to a laohuzao, a tiger stove shop, a neighborhood bathhouse. It was random, local, filled with the constant sound of running water. They passed under the oil-paper lanterns with their brush-written characters saying qing shui pen tang, pure hot water tubs, and paid a few coppers each to enter the men’s side.

Thick with steam and mist, it consisted of one small anteroom in which clients undressed, followed by another room with a large wooden tub. High above was a wire cable hung with baskets, watched over by an attendant; this allowed everyone to see their belongings at all times. Kung tucked his gold watch and his glasses into his shoes before they put their clothes in two baskets. As Lin followed the round naked man into the mist, he was struck by the strangeness of seeing the richest man in China in a back-alley bathhouse.

They scrubbed at the wooden buckets ranged around the side, using clean cloths softened by endless laundering, then stepped into the large wooden tub and inched over to the far side to talk.

It was blessedly hot; Lin sank in to his neck.

Kung said, “I need you to help me with something. It is more important than anything I have ever done. If I fail, my life will be worthless.”

Lin, who had been floating in the redeeming waters, jerked to attention. “Duke Kung. How can you say that?” Not only rich and powerful, he was also a seventy-fifth-generation descendant of Confucius.

“I told you when my friends died-Shengold and Schwartz-I realized if wealthy men could not escape, no one could. I call myself a Christian.” Kung stretched his pale, fat form out in the water. “It’s a lie unless I act. I have to do something. Now God has given me a chance, a way to get Jews out of Germany.”

“What?” said Lin. The relationship between Nationalist China and the Nazis was fragile: Germany was close with Japan, though not a formal ally. Nevertheless, the Nationalists hoped Germany might pressure Japan to leave China alone. And Chiang Kai-shek admired Hitler; he had modeled his own secret police after Germany’s SS. “The Germans on the Municipal Council are pressing to get the twenty thousand Jews we have in Shanghai now deported to someplace else.”

“I know,” said Kung, “but at least they are here already. They are safe. Millions in Germany and Austria still have to get out-that’s what I want to discuss. We have a plan-a petition Sun Fo and I are going to present to the legislature in Chongqing on April twenty-second.”

Lin Ming sat up with a little splash, because now he was talking about laws. “What? A petition to the Legislative Yuan?”

“That’s right.” Kung turned in the water. “We’ll establish a resettlement area, a new homeland for European Jews. They are a boon, not a burden; anyone can see that here in Shanghai. Down in Yunnan, where we have built the Burma Road, we have two whole counties almost empty, ready to be developed, the new road connecting them to the world. And we can bring the refugees by sea to Rangoon, and right through Burma to our border.”

“Ah.” Lin understood. “Because it’s British.”

“Nowhere will the Germans be able to get near them. But I need you to set things up as it was done here-barracks, soup kitchens, all the assistance people will need who arrive with nothing. Twenty thousand are self-sufficient in Shanghai; we will multiply that in Yunnan. The main industry will be farming, at first, but the land is good, the climate ideal, and there is plenty of water. They can build what society they like, within Chinese law.”

“Permanent resettlement?” It took its shape in Lin’s mind slowly. “Quite a gesture.”

“China needs to make a gesture. Naturally we hope to get the sympathy of the West against Japan, but that is not the reason. I told you. God wants this done.” Kung’s face was so radiant through the steam that for a moment, Lin was moved to believe.

But then Kung was himself again, practical. “Meanwhile, we can develop these counties easily, bring in engineers, teachers, horticulturists, men, women, children. It will lift the whole region up. Look at Shanghai. Now there are cabarets where the satire is every bit as sharp as in Berlin, there are fine Viennese bakeries, and new musicians in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.”

“How many people are you proposing to bring out of Germany?” said Lin.

Kung paddled his hands in the water and looked at him, the light in his eyes shining. “One hundred thousand.”