Night in Shanghai (29 page)

“You have the point,” she said, agreeing, but her concession gave him no comfort.

After she left, he spiraled down quickly, getting by on his one meal a day with the Huangs and some money she had left behind for him. In April, when he ran into Eugen Silverman at an audition, he mentioned he was low on money, and Eugen took him to meet a Chinese man named Mr. Pao. This man was looking to hire an American, though the job had nothing to do with music.

“I run a newspaper,” Mr. Pao explained over tea in his modest apartment, “the
Shanghai Daily
. You have heard of it?”

“Of course.” Thomas and Eugen exchanged looks; it was one of the papers whose ads they followed.

“I need a publisher,” said Mr. Pao, and then tittered at Thomas’s horrified expression. “No experience necessary. Only the use of your name. With an American publisher, we can continue printing. They will leave us alone. I will pay you the salary. You see?”

Yes, Thomas saw. He also saw that newspaper offices had been bombed, and their employees killed, all over town. Newspapers were magnets. “Sorry, pal. Too dangerous.”

“It is a salary,” Eugen protested.

“Too high a price.” Thomas remembered the words of warning he’d been given in Seattle:
People disagree, they end up dead. Play your music and keep clear of it
. “Can’t do it.”

So his clothes grew looser on him, and he spent most of his time in his room, waiting for the evening to come, when he got food and an hour of listening to the radio. He lost himself in his dreams of Song, but in his rational moments, he was aware of life slipping away.

Early summer had brought warm days when a man came to the door of the crowded lane house asking for Thomas Greene. He was white, European, underfed, with a shock of brown hair above soft, sensitive eyes. He carried a violin case.

“David Epstein,” he said, and they shook.

“Thomas Greene.”

“You will forgive my English. Aaron Avshalomov gave me your name—you know him? Arosha?”

“Why yes,” Thomas cried, glad to hear of his friend. “How is he?”

“He is well. He said he thought you might be free to play. You see? I have the hope.” Epstein smiled apologetically and hoisted his instrument.

Thomas shook his head; he had not played in so long, he was not sure he even still could. “Play what?”

“My desire? My most constant dream since I left Vienna? To play my favorite of Mozart’s two sonatas for violin and piano in B-flat.”

“Oh.” Thomas had never played either, though they were gorgeous. “I’ve had no piano for a year.”

“No? If I find piano, will you play the Mozart with me? I so miss to make music.”

Thomas considered.

Epstein looked him up and down, no doubt noticing he was thinner than a man with enough money to eat ought to be. “We could play for tips. Make enough to eat, if we are good.”

“I would have to practice.”

“We can find something.”

He thought again. “Some friends of mine play at Ladow’s. Maybe there, in the morning. But I only sight-read, Mr. Epstein. I would need sheet music.”

“David. Call me David. I’ll come back with music.”

A few days later he was back with sheet music, by which time Thomas had been told that Ladow’s would allow them to practice in the club early in the day.

The first day they met, on Avenue Édouard VII, under a bright morning sun, David drew out the opening pages of the Largo-Allegro, the first movement of the Mozart, right on the street, before they even went inside. “I would need to read through this once or twice,” Thomas said.

“I thought so. You say many months, no playing, is it not? So I bring this, too.” The Viennese drew out another sheaf of music, and opened it to the first page.

Thomas saw it was
Liebesleid
by the violin master and composer Fritz Kreisler, a piece written by and for the violinist in which the piano played a lesser role and could be sight-read by any competent accompanist.

“Of course I can play this,” he said, covering his embarrassment at having implied he needed something so easy. “Naturally.”

“The piano is simple,” David admitted, “but that is not why I bring this piece. I need money, Mr. Greene. I have a wife and baby in Hongkou and—”

“You came to Shanghai with a wife and baby?”

“Yes! We are so lucky to get out. We had to leave my wife’s parents—I am sure they will die—and her cousin—” He choked for a moment, and recovered himself. “Forgive me. We cannot get the rest of our family out—our friends—we have left so many behind. But now I have my wife and son here, they need to eat, and I need money. And you and I, Mr. Greene, we can make money playing in the hotel lobbies. That’s why the Kreisler. His music is very, how do I say,
gemütlich
. German and Austrian people love it, because it sounds to them like comfortable times, happy, before the war. You understand? This Vienna, they want to remember. It will make them tip us well.”

They practiced together for several weeks, during which Thomas found himself smiling again, even at little things like the street acrobats and puppet shows now reappearing in the lanes with the warm weather. He was still weak, but music returned, as reliably as any true faith, always demanding, always giving. He still played for Song, too, though she was far away. Those were the moments when he caught a surprised grin from David, and knew he had played well.

By the first week of June, the two of them were ready. They went first to talk to the manager of the Park Hotel, because Thomas had noticed a Steinway there.

The man knew his name. “You were one of the brightest stars of Night in Shanghai,” he said, wistfully recalling a time which had ended only two years before but already seemed like it belonged in another century. “Of course you can play in the lobby. I cannot pay you, but you can open the violin case for tips—and, all right, you may each have one meal in the restaurant, free, for every music shift. Agreed?”

They went from one hotel to another, making the same arrangement, which had natural appeal for hotel management. Shanghai was full of people living quietly, waiting it out, surviving on little. Hotel lobbies in Frenchtown and the
Gudao
were free, semipublic spaces, and many of the people coming in would order tea and cake.

In this manner Thomas and David started at the Park, kicking off with the Mozart. Later on, they played the Kreisler pieces. David grinned and motioned with his chin—and the whole violin—to people retrieving handkerchiefs to wipe at their eyes. “You see? They hear Kreisler and they get all
verklempt
.”

He was right, for the
Liebesleid
and
Liebesfreud
brought double the tips of Mozart and Brahms. When the plaintive strains of Kreisler started, that was when the older men in their moth-eaten suits turned to their wives, took their swollen hands, and steered them out onto the dance floor among the potted palms.
This is what they want from the music, a feeling, a connection to another time
. He glanced at David, who had brought him here.
Thank you
. He poured his gratitude into the passage he was playing, stretching out the feeling with shameless melodrama and rubato, and touched hearts all around the room—if the sudden rainfall of coins in the violin case was any indication. He caught David’s eye, and the flash of his grin, its pure happiness, was better even than the sound of the money.

Lin Ming left the town of Tengchong in an open jeep, with a driver of the local Bai minority, on the last stretch of the Burma Road before they hit the border to that adjoining nation. Tengchong was high on a stony plateau, surrounded by volcanoes and smoking, bubbling hot springs that sent columns of steam into the air. Life was simple and pastoral, with hundreds of local families engaged in cutting basalt flagstones for use as pavement in the region’s towns. Yet there was energy here, in the hot springs; trained engineers would be able to turn it into electricity.

As they left the cooler plateau and descended toward the warm, low-lying jungles of the border, they stopped in a village called Heshun, with cobbled streets and a river winding around it. Many people from this village had gone overseas and made their fortunes, and then sent money back to build a large library with tall windows and tens of thousands of volumes. Below the village the road descended into a broad, unoccupied valley, fertile and well watered. And as long as anyone could remember, the area had also been home to a lively trade in jadeite and rubies.
The Jews will like it here
, he thought.

They would have to be fed at first, and housed, and that would be his job. Right now, all he could think about was Sun Fo and Kung’s petition, which had been passed by the legislature on April twenty-second.

Jewish people holding citizenship of foreign countries retain the duties and rights of citizens of those countries, and, if they wish to enter China, they can do so in accordance with the usual practices and regulations . . . stateless Jewish people are in a special situation. We ought to do everything possible to assist them in expression of our country’s commitment to humanitarianism
.

It was law now: one hundred thousand Jews to be selected and brought here to start over. Looking out over the verdant, empty countryside, he swelled with the rightness of it.

Now Kung was going to pay him all the rest of the money he needed to buy out his
qin’ai de Zhuli
. As they descended through the valley, he thought of his last visit with her, when he held her through the night and told her it would not be long. “My plan is almost ready,” he whispered, and she lay against him, content, unquestioning, waiting. She trusted him.

From the very first day he and David played at the Park, Thomas took home enough to start eating more, and he soon rebounded to full energy. The flexing of his musical imagination followed, and he started taking liberties with the scores. He still sight-read on automatic, like riding a bicycle, but now he found himself departing from what was written for more than the occasional ornament. He also pulled the rhythmic accents out of line, the way they had done on stage at the Royal. His little solos never undermined the melodic themes or structures of the piece. He always knew where he was.

At the Park, they ate their meal in the restaurant during a break: steak, whipped potatoes, green beans, and hot, delicate cloverleaf rolls. Thomas relished the Western food even though he knew the Huangs would hold his supper for him until he got back. David, on the other hand, ate quickly, with a barely contained desperation that Thomas knew all too well.
And he’s here with a wife and child
.

“What do you gentlemen say to our cuisine here at the Park?” It was the hotel manager, brimming with pride in his high-class service and also happy with the music, having seen a sharp uptick in beverage service.

“It’s very fine,” said Thomas. “Just one problem. We really should not eat while we play.”

David looked stricken.

Thomas pushed on. “It is distracting. So we were wondering, while we perform, can Mr. Epstein’s wife and son come to the hotel and have our meals, in our place?” He was bland and perfectly sensible.

“Why not?” the manager said. And across the table Thomas saw David’s eyes fill with gratitude. From then on, when they played the Park, Margit and Leo came, rail-thin in their best Vienna clothes, and ate as fine a Western meal as money could buy, while white-jacketed waiters hovered around them. Thomas noticed that Leo was ravenous but Margit ate sparingly, and packed up food to take home for David. All the while, the open violin case accumulated coins and banknotes.

He knew he was himself again when he took Alonzo and Ernest and Charles to lunch at a Russian restaurant, and insisted on picking up the check. He even said he was going to start saving again for their tickets, and get them out.

“Sure you are,” Ernest said.

“Forget it, pal,” Charles put in.

Alonzo was laughing while they spoke, with his bumping bass rumble that always sounded like it might have come from his instrument, and soon they all joined in, even Thomas, who in the sudden clarity of mirth saw that he had been a fool since the very beginning. Their lives were their own. If they had wanted to save money, they would have. Alonzo sent his money home to his family; Ernest and Charles simply burned through whatever they had. Nothing Thomas had ever suggested to them had made any difference. But they liked their lives, all three of them, and they were choosing to remain, the same way he was. There was a new scent of freedom around them, and him too, when he could finally let them be that way.

In that June of 1939 a woman doctor arrived in Yan’an, a surgeon named Dr. Wei. She was the first woman doctor Song had met, and though she had the broad cheekbones and cheerful smile of a rural girl, she had in fact been trained at Peking Union Medical College in all the latest advances. Long lines of women from throughout the encampment, all eager to consult a female doctor, formed to see her.

Dr. Wei was Chinese and needed no translator, so it was mere luck that Song was assigned to assist her on the day a messenger arrived on horseback from Baoding Village with the news that a nine-year-old girl had fallen from a second-floor window onto her head. Dr. Wei barked out the supplies she needed as she sloughed off her clinic coat and grabbed her medical bag. “You!” she said to Song. “Take this, follow me to the truck. You can help.”

“I’m not a nurse,” Song said, as the leather cases were piled into her arms.

“Doesn’t matter!” Dr. Wei called. A flatbed truck was waiting, and Song climbed up in the big square cab beside her.

It was a hard two hours over a bumpy road to Baoding, where they scrambled out in a grove of cypress trees, and ran into the building where the girl waited. “Here!” the villagers cried. And at the end of the hall they found her, lying on a table, unconscious, with a contusion on the side of her skull just behind the ear.

Dr. Wei bent over the girl, examining her quickly. When she took off the blood pressure cuff, her face was worried. She told the women to boil water, and then turned to Song. “Subdural hematoma. We have to operate right away.”