Shanghai (113 page)

“Nothing. But they know I like people to keep their promises.”

“Be careful. When a new regime takes power it dictates which promises need to be kept and which ought to be broken.”

Loa Wei Fen smiled. “I'll consider that.”

“Do. For now, hide yourself well, and thank you for retrieving these.”

Loa Wei Fen left and ten minutes later was on the theatre's roof. Had he looked toward the river the Assassin would have seen a sight that would have taken his breath from him—an Indiaman sailing ship in full sail was turning the far reach of the Huangpo and heading toward the Bund docks. But he didn't look toward the river. He pried open the roof's trap door and slid back into the theatre, touching down on a high rafter as lightly as a sparrow alighting on a wire. And there the Assassin—like a predator in the high reaches of a bamboo stand—awaited the dawn, awake and watching.

At first light the Assassin finally spread his weight evenly along the ceiling beam and shut his eyes. As sleep took him, he thought of the hidden channels the History Teller—after he'd received Fong's two beads, and well after he thought the theatre was empty—had directed his two technicians to build into the perimeter of the stage.

Images of fire filled Loa Wei Fen's dreams—and the snake on his back uncoiled, ready to strike, while his swalto blade turned and sought his hand.

* * *

Rehearsal, Day Three

 

The third rehearsal day began just after sunrise. The actors were out on the sidewalks and in small parks stretching, performing Tai Chi exercises, and warming
up their voices for the long day of work ahead. Some juggled balls or fighting clubs as they went through their morning preparations. Everyone knew they had better be ready when they took the stage—the History Teller was already wearing that possessed look he got when things were not going well.

Back in the theatre, the History Teller sat cross-legged on the stage looking at drawings on the floor. A middle-aged man stood over his shoulder. The Assassin crept forward on his rafter beam and looked down.

“It needs to be bigger,” the History Teller said.

“How big?”

Loa Wei Fen was shocked that he recognized the man's voice. Then his posture and his strong, heavy hands.

“I'd like it from floor to ceiling,” the History Teller said.

The man glanced up into the fly space above the proscenium arch.

Loa Wei Fen saw the Carver's serene face. He felt the earth spin. Then it settled.
Is it all coming to this?
he thought.
Everything distilled down to one place, one moment in time?

“What if it's all head, no body?” asked the Carver.

The History Teller smiled, “Identification would be no problem that way, to be sure. Would that make it easier?”

“It would make it possible,” the Carver said. “And you want another?”

“There's a Prince of the East who gives away his daughter and a Prince of the West who ignores her—so two powerful men, yes.”

The Carver nodded. “It can be done …”

“Good,” the History Teller said. “The first one rises and shatters, the second one should fly in.”

“I'll make the first out of thin shells and the second from starched paper.”

“Can the second be made of silk?”

“A face made of women's tears?”

“Yes, of women's tears.” There was a moment of silence between the men, and then the History Teller asked, “Does silk readily burn?”

“Yes, it can even be treated to burn in patterns.”

“Can it burn in a circle, or two circles?”

“Like Li Tian's famous fireworks?”

“Yes!”

The Carver turned away and mumbled, “Tears again.”

“Yes, my friend, tears again. Treat the silk that way.”

The Carver nodded.

“Can we have them soon?”

“No,” the Carver said as he gathered up his drawings. “You can get them when they're ready, and not before. You're not the only one who takes pride in his work.”

The History Teller smiled and canted his head. “Fine. When do you think that might be?”

“Four days hence at the earliest.”

—

That day's rehearsal was gruelling. The History Teller put up a scene, and before two minutes had passed he called out, “Enough. God, stop!” He marched up the centre aisle shoving soldiers and wardens aside, muttering to himself. He grabbed his script, ripped out pages, flipped them over, and began to write. The actors gathered round him with their scripts and tried to get the changes as he
shouted them out. As the day progressed it got worse. One seven-line sequence he changed thirty-one times before he had it the way he wanted it.

Chiao Ming's son stood in the wings for the whole day—amazed, awestruck by the art of his grandfa-ther—and was filled with pride.

* * *

Night Three

 

The Chin family had always taken on the responsibility of building the dragon and then manning it for the climactic end of the Lantern Festival and the New Year's celebration: the Dragon Dance that scares away evil and brings in good luck. But when they arrived at the old warehouse down by the Suzu Creek they were surprised to see that hundreds of bamboo stalks had already been cut to size, the paper had been painted, and bolts of silk were hanging to stretch along the north wall.

Then they saw the small man in the filthy cassock.

Behind the small man, a craggy-faced fellow, probably a mariner, stepped forward and in coarse Shanghainese told the representatives of the Chin family that they were relieved of their duties, at least for that year.

“Why?”

“New rulers,” the craggy-faced man said, “want things done in a new way.”

“Who are you?”

“I am who I am.”

For just an instant the Chin family members bridled, but then they smelled the reek of ozone in the warehouse and knew that change was upon them—and they
retreated, leaving the chore of building and then dancing the New Year's dragon to this new team.

When the Chins finally left the warehouse, shadows appeared from the walls—and as they took bamboo shafts in their hands they assumed corporeal form. A handsome
Fan Kuei
with an opium pipe, a tall Han Chinese with a strange version of the Bible, a woman without ears or nose, a man with a wine stain on his left cheek, a large African with a smile that lit up the room, an elegant man with jasmine-scented breath, and a dozen more. But of the strange visitors in the warehouse the strangest was a tall man with long braids, a deep scowl, and the bearing of a man of great power. He raised his hand and a wind swept into the warehouse. “Desert wind. Madness wind,” he said in a harsh whisper. Then his braids were picked up by the wind and thrown against his cheeks, making a distinctive
thwap, thwap thwap
.

—

That night, backstage, the boy opened the older man's dressing room door a crack and watched his grandfather, the History Teller, lean over a hooded lamp. He held one bead after another of the glass necklace in front of the intense, bright light. As he moved the beads closer to the lamp, sharply etched shadows filled the far wall.

* * *

Rehearsal, Day Four

 

The panes of the Vrassoons' windows shook with the fury of the Confucian's screams. “How hard can it be to find one red-haired
Fan Kuei?
He must stand out like a beggar in the snow!”

The forty Confucian lieutenants said nothing. They had already seen six of their ranks replaced when they hadn't succeeded at tasks the Confucian had assigned them.

“So go! Find me the red-haired
Fan Kuei!
” Then the Confucian thought of the actor who had come to see him three nights before with the bizarre claim that the red-haired
Fan Kuei
was now a member of the History Teller's acting troupe.

—

“No!” the History Teller yelled.

Maximilian turned and, lifting his shoulders, said, “I'm sorry but—”

“Don't apologize—get it right.”

They'd been working on Maximilian's scene with his son and the Monkey King since sunrise.

Maximilian, as the Peasant, enters with his son from downstage left. The Monkey King corners them and is about to attack when the Princess appears upstage right. The Monkey King leaps in her direction. Maximilian's character wants to take the opportunity to steal away, but his son convinces him to help the Princess. When they find her, she is holding the remains of the Serving Man's bloody clothing and delivers the evening's most haunting aria. As she finishes, the Monkey King leaps at her, but the Peasant and his son distract the Monkey King—in a most unusual way—allowing the Princess to escape.

But no matter how simple the History Teller made the sequence, Maximilian couldn't seem to master it.

“I'm sorry,” Maximilian said a second time.

“More with the sorry,” the History Teller said. “Forget that. Think of what you want from the Monkey
King—how entranced you are by the Princess—not the footsteps or the words. Think the thoughts, swallow the thoughts, say my stupid words.”

—

The Confucian was surprised when Mao summoned him to his office, but he waited as patiently as he could manage for the great man to speak.

The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party was staring out the window at the confusion that was Shanghai. He let out a long sigh and said, “I cannot wait to leave this awful place.”

“Yes, Comrade, this is an awful place,” the Confucian agreed, still wondering why he had been summoned.

“I leave the night of the play, right after the ship.”

“I will prepare myself.”

“No,” Mao said, with a finality that chilled the Confucian. “You—and your kind—are to stay here. You will teach these Shanghainese a lesson. We will squeeze them so hard that even water will lose its moisture. We will make this abomination a desert—by ignoring it. We will allow it to fall apart. Piece by piece it will crumble into the muck, while the rest of China rises.”

* * *

Night Four

 

“It was my mother's favourite fan. It belonged to her mother before her,” Jiang said. The History Teller looked awful. “You need sleep, not more instruction,” she said.

“I need a moment of perfection, just one, before it is all gone.”

“Before what is all gone?”

“All of it. Before it's all, all gone.”

She looked at him more closely. His eyes were rheumy and yellowed at the corners. His skin was almost translucent. Then, to her surprise, she saw that he had fallen asleep, with his eyes wide open. She tilted him over onto the bed and began to remove his Princess costume. It confused her. She knew he was a man, a handsome man, but she was undressing a woman in the privacy of her room. Then she lay down beside him—her—and they slept till the dawn.

—

In the warehouse by the Suzu Creek they worked slowly, methodically. Bamboo to paper insert to silk stretched tight. Bamboo shafts to form the dragon's spine and support the massive head. Long poles to support the great beast's hundred-foot length. No one spoke. Everyone obeyed the ancient rules. The dragon took form.

* * *

Rehearsal, Day Five

 

Despite large sections that he wasn't happy with, the History Teller knew that he had to give his company a chance to run the play—to get some sense of its rhythm and breadth. The Carver's creations hadn't arrived yet, but the History Teller had lots of other concerns.

The run started well, since it began with a scene that they had played for many years, but as soon as they got past that, things began to unravel.

Then the dress rehearsal was stopped by the entrance of the Confucian at the head of a large contingent of soldiers.

“Perform!” he ordered. “You work at the behest of the people, and we are the people, so perform!”

The Assassin rolled over on his rafter. An ancient voice whispering in his ear, “
From above, always attack from above
.”

“Fine, we'll go back a bit,” the History Teller said.

“No. Go on. Don't let us disturb you. Continue!”

Next was the Monkey King scene, with Maximilian and his son.

“We'll go back,” the History Teller repeated.

The actor playing the Serving Man shouted, “Let's complete the thing at least once before we put it in front of an audience.”

It struck the History Teller as an odd thing for the Serving Man to say, since his character, as he had so accurately noted, had already completed his work in the piece. Then he saw that feral look again and thought,
You called the Confucian, didn't you?
but what he said was, “I'm adding a new scene here.”

A hearty grumble came from the company. The History Teller ignored them and turned to the Serving Man. “You'll be pleased, since you are the centre of the new scene.”

“Really?” he asked, clearly not as pleased as he ought to have been.

“Absolutely. No point allowing your role to be such that you could be replaced with a lamppost—is there?” Before the Serving Man could answer, the History Teller
announced, “We're going to re-enact your death at the hands of the Monkey King—after all, you are the hero.”

The company had seen the History Teller drive an actor hard, but never like this. In rapid succession the History Teller set up the killing scene, then staged the fight with a stark realism that shocked the company. Twice the Serving Man hit the floor with so much force that the thud echoed through the old building. Both times the History Teller stood in the audience and shouted at the Monkey King, “It looks fake. Awful. Really throw him. Hard. Throw him hard. Kill him. Kill him for us. In front of us. That's what they really want to see, so let's give it to them. Kill him for us.”

Maximilian watched closely as the fight between the Serving Man and the Monkey King increased in intensity, until finally the Serving Man backed off. He turned toward the auditorium and shouted, “I know what you're doing!” and ran from the stage.