Night in Shanghai (27 page)

“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.”