Night in Shanghai (26 page)

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.”