by Nicole Mones
Thomas was shaky, though, and he went directly to Anya’s rooming house and rang her bell. He rang over and over, and she never came down. The window light was on in her room, which usually meant she was out. Where? He checked his new gold watch. It was almost three A.M.
Yet much of Shanghai was still awake. In fact, though only two hours had elapsed since his conversation with Morioka, Du Yuesheng would by now have already parsed every word they said.
The next afternoon, Du summoned Lin Ming to Rue Wagner, and they met in one of the quietly carpeted second-floor studies, with wooden shutters tightly closed against the early summer heat. As usual, Du showed no discomfort, not even a shimmer of perspiration, and his voice was as cool as stone. “Twice in one week he has approached the American,” he told Lin. “We are moving ahead.”
“Moving ahead how?” Lin’s voice strained its fragile film of normalcy. “If I may—”
But Du interrupted him. “Your man will be watched all the time for the right opportunity.”
“Perhaps you don’t need Thomas Greene. Isn’t it excessive? Isn’t it using Mount Tai to crush an egg?” He knew his father was ever vulnerable to a classical idiom.
“You are here because I am showing you the respect of warning you,” Du said sharply. “Do not presume to question.”
Lin said nothing.
“We have to kill the blood-sucking ghost. It will throw them into confusion and put us on top, like overturning the river and pouring out the sea. Naturally we will try to keep your American safe. In the end, though, that is irrelevant.”
The words sliced through Lin. “And who is going to be watching him?”
“I’m bringing in an outside man for this job,” said Du. “His name is Zhao Funian.”
Lin Ming nodded, silent, thinking there was nothing left for him now except bao tou shu cuan, to cover his head and slink away like a rat.
That week, Avshalomov’s boy came to the door of the house with a note inviting Thomas to a rehearsal of the composer’s tone poem Hutungs of Peking. Thomas had the boy tipped and fed, as was proper, and a few days later sent back his own most junior servant with a reply that he would be honored. He greatly enjoyed his nights out with Anya, trawling the underside of Shanghai, but this was an outing of another sort; Avshalomov was a composer of stature.
They had seen each other six months earlier, when Avshalomov’s piano concerto had premiered at the Lyceum, the concert hall where Shanghai gathered on Sunday afternoons to hear music before going out to dinner. The concerto was performed by Gregory Singer, Avshalomov’s customary pianist, as the second half of a program that began with Beethoven’s Fifth. Greene attended the concert and afterward sent Little Kong over with a warm note of congratulations. Now Avshalomov had responded with this invitation.
Thomas had seen that there was music all over Shanghai, from pit orchestras for the film and recording studios to the Shanghai Symphony. The city teemed with classically trained players. Some musicians were Chinese, some were older Russian Jews who had come years before, and now younger, immensely talented European Jews were arriving too, players who had fled persecution and found their way to the city’s orchestras.
Avshalomov was different; he had been in China most of his life. “I am trying to capture everything you hear in the lanes of Peking,” he explained. “The chants of the vendors, the buzz of the barber’s fork, the temple bells, everything.”
“I loved your piano concerto, by the way.”
“Ah, thank you, I received your kind note. Did you notice the boy on the celesta? My son, Jack!”
Just then a loud buzzing tone filled the stage. “That is the huan tou, the barber’s tuning fork,” Avshalomov said. “That was how the barber announced his arrival in the neighborhood, and everyone who needed a trim or a shave would come outside. You could hear it from quite far away. Ah, we will begin now.” And with a small Old World bow, he excused himself.
Thomas watched him in front of the orchestra, pressing the trombones and tuba for bigger sound, directing the temple blocks and bells and Chinese drums, asking the violins to come in softly and crest in waves like insects on a summer night. He led the musicians through, explaining, correcting, singing. “Here,” he called out. “This is the operatic tune. I want that feel. Violins, play with one finger on the E string; accentuate your trills. Again.”
At the end of the run-through Thomas complimented him, and they talked for a bit. “It is clear what your training is,” Avshalomov said. “When you play, ça se voit. But this group you are in now—these Kansas City Kings—I feel this is the future. I hear jazz arrangements everywhere—do you not as well? Brass, more than anything else—in movies, on the radio, even in advertisements. I hear it but I do not always find beauty in it. In your playing, there is always beauty.”
“Thank you,” said Thomas. “But if I may ask, do you think it’s safe for us to continue playing here if the Japanese invade?”
Avshalomov looked sadly at him, only in his forties but older from the weight of all he had seen, his expression grave beneath the light hair that floated in an untamed aureole around his head. “No,” he said. “But if they take over, you will not want to play here anyway. I know. I am from the north.”
That night, Song returned to the Royal.
At once his anxiety ignited, for Anya was here, languid and lovely at her usual table. Song came in with her eyes downcast, walking a few paces behind Du and his bodyguards, as she always did. Thomas willed his eyes away from her and kept them on the keys, barely breathing. He looked up at her two or three times while they were playing, but fleetingly, and in a way no one could possibly have noticed.
But Anya saw. That night, on their way back to her place from the theater, she brought it up. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“The woman up in the box.”
“The box belongs to the gang boss,” he said.
“I know. I’m asking about her.”
“She comes in with him. That is all I know.”
Anya still studied him, speculating as the rickshaw bumped and swayed along, but he went quiet, and so did she. Then when they reached her place, they flew at each other, joining on the bed in a frenzy.
Later, when they had quieted, she turned to him to speak. He thought she might return to the subject of Song Yuhua, but instead she surprised him by saying he could no longer come to her room at night; a “no visitors” rule had been imposed by her landlord. “He meant you,” she apologized. “You have come so often. There is nothing I can do—”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, wondering where they would meet now.
“Perhaps where you live?” she said.
“I don’t think that would do. I’ve taken in two young brothers from the band. They’re just teenagers.”
She gave him a look, because anyone could see they were far from innocent. “Well, then. Perhaps you should rent a room for us. We can meet there. Something small would not be more than seven or eight dollars a month. You can afford it.”
True, he could, and why not? So starting that week, he secured a small ground-floor studio on the Huangpu, at the end of Peking Road, across from the docks, with cooling wood shutters to filter the river air. They went there together after hours, and slept in the predawn coolness, and when the sounds of the day started to rise outside, he got up and went home. It was his last period of routine quietude before the world fell apart.
Song debated long and hard about giving one of the diamonds to the Party. If Du caught her, of course, she was dead, but if Du were to discover her secret affiliations in any one of a hundred ways, she was equally dead, so one more risk hardly mattered. What frightened her was something different, that the gift was so ostentatious for a leftist. A diamond. It would have been safer to convert it to cash first, except that then she would be exposed to even greater danger, for gossip from a gem dealer could easily get back to Du.
Still, to hand over the diamo
nd would cement her commitment. This was wealth she found by chance, and it belonged not to her but to China.
One diamond, anyway. The other three would stay well hidden.
The midday rain had cleared, and she saw shopkeepers on both sides of the street reopening their lattices to the wet sidewalks, while sellers of books and magazines and curios moved their racks back out to the street. Men in light, sun-shielding fedoras and cotton gowns stopped to peruse string-bound volumes and old prints. The letter writers came back, small-town scholars who had failed the examinations and now waited for customers behind flimsy folding tables.
She felt for these men, since she too had received an education she could not use, except when she translated for Du. Before his gambling losses, her father had been set on making her a modern woman. He had engaged the best tutors for her older brother, and always insisted she sit in on his lessons. When her brother died of consumption, all the father’s ambition transferred to little Yuhua, Jade Flower, an old-fashioned and ornamental name she had never liked. Nevertheless she wore the name he gave her, and studied hard to please him. Though only eight or nine, she could feel the family’s future resting on her, and excelled, especially at English. Her younger sisters were but babies then, and she spent all her time with tutors.
But then, after her mother died, her father started going out at night, and reeling back, white-faced, in the mornings. Artworks were sold off: a pair of Yongzheng mille-fleurs bowls, a Qianlong white jade censer, a blue and white dragon dish from the reign of Chenghua, her late mother’s green jade bracelets. Then other mornings he would come home with money in his pockets, and meaningless gifts. She saw what was happening, but she was only a girl with no more power than a grain of millet afloat in a vast sea. All she could do was watch. At last there came a day when he drew an unlucky hand, and forfeited the ancestral compound and all the land surrounding it.
That was when he begged her, crumbling inelegantly to his knees.
“Ba, don’t,” she said, shocked. “Get up.” She disliked this memory. She preferred to think of the shady gardens, the round gates through which respectful servants passed with trays or basins or folded linens, leaving behind the slip-slop of their cotton shoes against the flagstones. That was the memory she allowed.
She had no desire to go back to her family. They had sold her and never made contact again—out of shame, no doubt, for the Songs were a locally illustrious family and their daughters had to marry respectably. Indeed, that was the story they put about, when she disappeared, that she had gone away to be married, and people believed it.
She was born and bred to be used, as surely as any peasant or worker. Communism had saved her, to her way of thinking, opposing as it did the feudal ways that had landed her in this servitude to begin with. Her beliefs elevated her; they connected her to the city.
She had heard it said that every block in Shanghai held a thousand souls, when you added up mothers, fathers, children, shop workers, and servants, and when she was out, moving through the lanes like this, she could feel the rhythm of their breathing like a single organism, hear the hum of their thoughts. This was ren min to her, the people, this pulsing urban honeycomb, and they were her real cause.
As she entered the apothecary shop, she brushed her fingers past the hidden pocket inside her dress to confirm for the hundredth time that the pouch was still there.
“Young mistress.”
“Special prescription today,” she said, and handed the old herbalist a blank sheet of paper, a prearranged signal that meant she needed a meeting. “Also the usual one.”
“Mistress is tired,” said the herbalist. “Take your ease in the parlor and I will send for tea. I regret that at this moment there is none here, I will have to send out, but it will only be a moment. Please.” He gave one more careful look around the shop to make sure no one was watching, and pulled the lever to release the hidden door in the wall.
“Thank you.” She entered and sat down with the impatient distraction of the young matron abroad in the city, until the wall of drawers shut again and she could relax from her role and dab the nervousness from her forehead. It was dim but for the small lamp, and cool, no brazier needed now to provide its halo of warmth. She knew it would take time for someone to fetch her current guide, the primary contact through which she reported any information she gleaned as a result of the evenings she spent by Du’s side. For a long time it had been Mr. Guo, aboveground identity and occupation unknown.
Presently the inner door opened and he came in, out of breath. He works nearby, she realized. He ran here in the heat from his place of work. “Mrs. Ma,” he said, with complete neutrality despite the urgency of his gasping. “How are you? Have you eaten?”
“Yes, thank you. You?”
“Yes.” He mopped his face as he sat.
“Do you remember our conversation when we last met?”
He was lost. “No.”
“You told me of your cousins in the north, their need. I said I would pray for a solution.”
“Ah,” he said. “The need.” As they both knew, the situation in the north was even worse now. Japan’s armies had been massed near Peking for weeks.
“The gods listened to me,” she said, extending the tiny package she had removed from within her dress.
He took it, confused.
“Careful,” she said, when he fumbled with the wrapper. The edge in her voice made him open the last square of silk attentively, after which his eyes all but fell from his head. A silence cloaked the little pool of lamplight between them.
“Your spittle is three feet long,” she said gently, when he could not stop staring.
He looked up. “Sorry.” The jewel vanished inside the silk, which he knotted over and over inside his handkerchief. “They will be most pleased in the north.”
“It was luck,” she said, hiding her elation. The north was the nerve center of the Party, their base. “Only one thing—enough must be set aside from this for the herbalist to provide for my mistress’s medicines, permanently. No matter what happens. That should only be a small part.”
“Agreed,” he said, giddy at the stone’s obvious value.
A tap sounded on the wall, and the hidden door released, with a wooden sigh. She rose. “My prescription is ready. So nice to see you. Please give my regards to your family.”
On her way out, the herb master handed her a packet of the usual tonics and restoratives. She nodded toward the inner room, now sealed off again, and said, “Talk to him about payment.” She walked out with a firm stride, pleased with what she had done. The mo shou, the “evil hand” of the aggressor, was bearing down on Shanghai, but she had done her part, today, to push it back.
Thomas awakened a half hour before dawn, curled up to Anya and her warm smell. Soon he would get up and go home, where, a little after midday, he would have breakfast with Charles and Ernest. Right now, though, he liked it here by the river, the fresh air and splashing waves and the hollow bass bumping of the hulls. Dawn would bring the soft slap of river water, then slowly the city would awaken to its human music, the thousands of conversations bubbling up as people rose from their beds throughout the streets and alleys and even on the water, on the bobbing brown sampans. The first minutes of every day were always a genial simmer of voices, before the din of commerce, traffic, and engines took over.
He lay listening against lace pillows, hands behind his head. He could see her scarves spilled over the mirror, her clothing in the small closet, her shoes. In a wash of clarity, he understood that she was living here.
Suddenly, things clicked together: the way she had him take her out to dinner every night, the half-starved manner in which she ate. The way she never wanted to meet anymore in the neighborhood where her room used to be, because she no longer had it, and no money either.
When she woke he said, “You let go of your room.”
“I cannot pay all that. Why go between two rooms? I have nothing.” Her voice became sweet,
appealing. “Can you not give me some cash every month? Not much. Just so I have something in my pocket. I haven’t a sou, not a centavo, not a Chinese dollar. Look what you spent on dinner last night, just for one night . . . can you not help me?”
“Of course,” he said, gathering her close. He felt ungentlemanly for not having noticed things sooner, and resolved to give her money regularly, starting with the clump of bills he left on the dresser that morning.
Yet as the days slid by, he started to wonder about it. Being a gentleman was important, but he did not love Anya, and had never thought of making it permanent. She brought him great pleasure and incalculable comfort, and obviously he should support her in return, but for how long?
“For as long as it pleases you to share her bed,” Lin said to him at lunch a week later, as he paged through the menu at De Xing Guan, a second-floor restaurant overlooking the river. They sat next to metal-crank windows, which were open to the summer humidity and the bobbing thatch-fabric of sampans, lorchas, and junks. Large vessels passing in the channel traded groans from their horns—the bottom note to Shanghai’s chord, a sound special to downtown Shanghai that Thomas had come to love.
Lin ordered the dish the restaurant was famous for, a rich, milky-white seafood chowder brimming with fish, shrimp, scallops, tofu, thin-sliced sea cucumber, and tangy mustard greens, touched by white pepper. To accompany this they had cold plates of pungent steeped cucumbers, gluten puffs with winter mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and ma lan tou, a minced salad of a local freshwater weed and savory dry tofu. Sensing his friend’s inner disturbance, Lin ordered rice spirits for both of them, bai jiu, powerfully alcoholic, served warm in a small crock. “You look like you have a fishbone stuck in your throat. Out with it,” he said, pouring.