Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  Just as she began to dress, Ah Pan slipped in. “Elder Brother’s downstairs.”

  Thanks to heaven. “Have Lin wait for me in the garden. Bring Dongting oolong and xi fan. Tell him by the time the tea is ready to pour I will be there.” She paused in front of the mirror to put up her hair. “Go!”

  Ah Pan vanished.

  On the back lawn she found him waiting, brooding as he stared across the back wall toward the smoke. For the first time ever, he looked old to her, his face sunken, cheekbones bulging. He looked more like Teacher.

  “It’s going to rain,” she said, to lighten things with a joke, for now, even as the Japanese bore down from the north, a typhoon was roaring toward them from the east, its black clouds piling up in the sky.

  Lin smiled mirthlessly as servants appeared with xi fan and condiments. She ladled the rice gruel into his bowl, and added the spring onion, smoked fish, shreds of river moss, and crisp peanuts she knew he liked. Another explosion boomed from the northeast, where the skies were darkening, though it was morning.

  “Ge,” she said, Elder Brother. “About Thomas.”

  “I know!” Lin burst out. “I warned him. Nets above and snares below—how could he do this?”

  “He has to be warned again.”

  Lin spooned up his xi fan, wincing at the far-off grumble of thunder. “They are watching me day and night.”

  “I’ll go,” Song said quickly. “No one will suspect me.” It was true; though she translated nimbly whenever English was needed, Du saw her mind as capable of containing the two languages, and nothing more. “Why would they connect me to him? He is nothing to me.” She watched Lin carefully and saw to her relief that he had no idea she and Thomas had met, not one time, but twice.

  Lin said slowly, “Do you think they would let you go out today?” He glanced to the north, where bombs flickered against the storm clouds.

  “It’s Saturday. Every Saturday I go downtown to buy Taitai’s medicine. Taitai needs her medicine.” She did not have to remind him that even though the Supreme Wife was incapacitated, in traditional ranking she was still the most important person in the household next to Du himself. “Should I go to his lilong house off Rue Lafayette?”

  “No. I just telephoned; he is not there. He went to a studio he keeps on Peking Road, just off the Bund, opposite the river. I have told him it’s unsafe there.”

  Her eyes widened; unsafe indeed. That intersection lay directly in front of the Idzumo, the Imperial Navy’s flagship, a massive war machine and an obvious target. “Don’t worry, Brother, I’ll go. I’ll take care of it.”

  Normally she left to buy the herbs late in the day, but at one o’clock, seeing the northern suburbs burning, she decided she dared wait no longer. The radio buzzed and chattered: last night Chiang had given the order to begin attacking Japanese positions, and now Zhabei, Wusong, and Jiangwan were on fire, with the Eighty-eighth Division struggling to hold the Japanese back and sending up plumes over the cityscape. The time was now.

  At the front door she was accosted by the guard. “I must get Taitai’s herbs.”

  “Danger. No one goes out.”

  “Taitai needs medicine. You know I go every Saturday. Her medicine is used up.” She raised the prescription. “I must go.”

  She saw him hesitate. “Give a look.” She threw her gaze out toward Rue Wagner. “It is quiet now, safe. In a few hours, who knows?”

  “The Supreme Wind is coming.” Tai Feng.

  “I will be back before it is upon us.”

  She saw his mind working. Taitai’s health was no small matter. “If Teacher comes home to find her sick—”

  “All right,” he said. “But one person, no. Someone must accompany you.”

  “I’ll get my maid,” she said, needing to grasp the reins quickly, before he could call one of the guards.

  A minute later, she and Ah Pan passed out through the compound gate into Rue Wagner, and instantly were pushed and eddied by a crowd unlike anything either had ever seen. A mass of Chinese made an endless white-shirted column trudging through the sweltering streets, carrying what they could, everyone pushing into the French Concession, another country, neutral, where they hoped to be safe from Japanese bombs or street-by-street attacks. Blocking the tide of refugees were islands of those who had walked as far as they could and then stopped, huddled on the ground to rest or sleep, children and clothing and cook pots shielded from the plodding line by their bodies.

  Song and Ah Pan linked hands and pushed through to Édouard VII, where Song’s hopes that the trolley might be running soon evaporated, for nothing moved there except the slow streams of people. “We will walk,” Song said, wondering how she was going to separate from the maid to see Thomas. They pushed against the human flow, out of the French Concession.

  “Come, little one,” Song said, when the girl’s pace slowed. “Not much further.”

  But the bondmaid stopped. “I have to go,” Ah Pan said.

  “Go where?”

  “Home.”

  “Your village? In Hebei? No,” said Song. This was impossible, no matter how much Song might have wished for privacy. “Too dangerous! There are no trolleys. What makes you think there are trains? You don’t even have money.”

  “I have money,” said Ah Pan, and touched her pocket to make a pathetic jingle of coins.

  “Ah Pan, listen to me.” Song took both the maid’s hands. “You are better off here. In Teacher’s house you will be safe, safer than almost anywhere.”

  “It’s my family,” said Ah Pan.

  Song felt the stab of it. It could hardly be worse for Ah Pan’s family; her native place had been overrun. “Listen,” said Song. “When this is over, I’ll ask leave for you to go see them. I’ll take you. We’ll go together. Right now—” she gestured toward the explosions, wondering if the maid would even be able to get out of the city alive. Thunder broke and mumbled across the sky; on top of everything else, Shanghai’s low-lying streets would soon be knee-deep in water as well. “Come,” she said to the girl, “let’s walk.”

  When they reached the herbalist, she turned to Ah Pan. Risky though it was to leave the girl on the sidewalk for a minute, to take her inside was impossible. No one from her life could meet the herbalist. “I need you to wait out here for a moment while I get the herbs. You cannot travel now. I swear to you, as soon as it is safe, we will go.” That was all she could say. She believed in freedom, and that meant the girl was not hers to command, in the end.

  Ah Pan stood stubborn, and they faced each other like two trees rooted in the earth. Finally the girl said, “Xia yi beizi,” next life. “Ni jin qu ba.” Go inside.

  “Please don’t go.” She didn’t want to let Ah Pan leave; it was dangerous. She wished she could command her. Suddenly everything that had drawn her, the rights of the worker, the equity, the higher way of thinking—all of it was xin luan ru ma, as tangled as a heap of rope. Her voice was a whisper. “Wait here. Please.” And she turned away even as it sliced her to do it, and walked inside.

  Uncle Hua stood at the kitchen door with his pant legs rolled up, slapping at mosquitoes on his calf as he peered up at the blackening sky. A siren screamed in the distance, making his heart startle and his flesh jump, turning his thoughts again to Master, who had not slept at home the night before, and still had not returned. Hua had told him over and over that his studio was dangerous, sitting as it did directly across from the Idzumo, but Master never wanted to listen. Wooden head, wooden brain. Moreover, it was wrong for him to leave Hua alone with the young brothers now, with the enemy approaching. He was the only servant left. Little Kong, Chen Ma, and Uncle Zhu had all departed the day before, back to their home villages, leaving a lot of trouble for Hua.

  Then there was his gambling business, which had abruptly withered. Things had never before gotten so bad that people stopped gambling, and though he was sure they were overreacting, they stopped playing nonetheless, and he could not bring them back. Twice cursed was
the fact that just now he was out three thousand, most of which was Master’s money. This was a sum he could normally make back in two or three weeks of busy operations, but now he had no operations at all. Curse the brown dwarf invaders. Curse their mothers. May their guts shrivel and protrude out through their mouths and be gnawed off by rats.

  He heard a noise behind him and saw Ernest in the doorway. “Little Master always look see,” he said, pretending annoyance at the teenager, whom he liked.

  “Hua Shu,” said Ernest, having added “Uncle” to his modest repertoire of Chinese words. “Where’s Thomas? He still didn’t come back.”

  “Master stay studio side.”

  “Not now,” said Ernest. “Listen to the bombs.”

  “Master working.”

  “Not now. Thomas knows it’s just the three of us here. He would have come home if everything was all right.”

  Hua shrugged.

  “I have to go check. Give me the address, catchee chop-chop.”

  Hua folded his arms. “No can do! Trouble very bad. Many peoples dead.”

  “That’s why I need to go.”

  “No! Two Little Masters stay here.”

  “Yes. I am going to look for him.”

  “No. You stay! I go.” Hua rolled down his pants, then huffed and muttered as he poked through the cupboard, finally pulling out an ancient black umbrella which he unfurled with dignity, leaning halfway out the door to open it and stepping out carefully beneath its canopy. Charles had come clattering in behind Ernest, and the two of them watched as Uncle Hua stomped away in the wind, twisting his umbrella this way and that to shield himself. Soon his gown was soaked and clinging to his midsection, and the wind, which the radio said was at seventy-eight kilometers per hour, tore his umbrella right out of his hands. He plodded on in his bubble of dignity, turned the corner, and vanished.

  Song made her way north on Jiangsu Road, turned right at the Land Bank, and crossed Yuanmingyuan Road. That was when she saw it, the Bund, the Peking Road Jetty, and the Idzumo, the great flag-snapping killer whale, moored right there in the river and surrounded by passenger liners, junks, freighters, and bobbling sampans, all tied down and riding hard at anchor. The first raindrops started to fall on her as she hurried down the block, past the majestic offices of Jardine Matheson and Canadian Pacific, to the small side door Lin had described to her, opening directly onto the sidewalk twenty or thirty meters in from the Bund. Next to the door was a louvered wood shutter, and behind it the window was open. She could hear the piano.

  Inside the room, Thomas had been playing since he awakened, still full of feeling from what he had seen the night before. It had been hot, and the waiters had propped open the lobby doors for air, so that through set after set, Thomas and his fellow Kings had watched the steady stream of people carrying bundles and children and elders on their backs, pouring into Frenchtown, where they thought they would be safe. The band performed to them all night, doors open, and every number they played carried the rootless blues of their homeland.

  When he awakened in the studio, he could smell the coming rain, and hear the river churning, boats butting and knocking, warning sounds he knew well from the coves near his grandfather’s farm on the Eastern Shore. It was enthralling, a drama, and it drew him naturally to the piano.

  He laid his hands on the keys in D-flat major and played the arpeggiated left-hand waterfall of Liszt’s concert étude Un Sospiro. In his right hand, he added a simple melody, not Liszt’s melody, his own, but bent and stretched, with the worried notes added. It grew, drawing energy from the weather. He kept up Liszt’s left-hand pattern, and with his right hand, he followed the wind, calling, responding. Then the rain started, first a scattered counter-rhythm of drops, but soon a jackhammering roar. He played to it, swelling the sound, until he heard something.

  It was a pounding. Someone knocking at the door.

  Who would come here? Quickly he pulled on his trousers, and snapped the suspenders up over his bare shoulders. Where was his shirt? He tilted up the shutters.

  Song! He yanked the door open.

  She jumped in, out of the rain, her cotton qipao plastered to her legs and body.

  “How long were you standing there?”

  “Since the rain started. I ran here almost all the way, but when I heard you, I was listening.”

  “Is something wrong?” He took her shoulders, lightly, and feeling how wet they were, reached for a towel and unfolded it over her back. “Why are you alone, with all this?”

  “My maid was with me, but she left. She wants to go home. I could not stop her.” She drew the rough-nubbed cotton close to her while the rain drummed on the shutters.

  “Leaving Shanghai, now? Shouldn’t we go look for her?” There was so much ren qing in his face, and it slipped its warm and simple arms around her though they stood several feet apart.

  She caught her breath. It was that same safe feeling she’d had before, in the teahouse with him. Before her mother died, she had felt this way all the time, protected as if by the laws of nature, but never since, with any other person. “No,” she said heavily. “But I thank you. She is gone. To find her is impossible.”

  “I’ll go with you, if you want. We can try.”

  She shook her head. “It was her choice, Thomas.” She softened the words by touching his arm, wanting to let him know how much his kindness meant to her at that moment.

  He guided her to the single chair and sat opposite her, on the piano bench, while she took down her hair and then expertly, unconsciously, re-twisted it behind her neck. “I came for Lin,” she said, “though no one can ever connect this with him. Swear.”

  “No one will.”

  “He says you must not go today. I say the same. No doubt you came to the same conclusion. Perhaps you said yes just to throw him off? But this chance Lin and I can’t take. We decided one of us had to come.”

  “Don’t worry. I would not dream of going. And he won’t go either. I mean,” he added quickly, “not in these conditions.” He glanced out at the storm with its bass notes rumbling underneath the random percussion of explosions from the city’s north side. “Come.” And he stood and held a hand out.

  The single room held the bed, a chair, a bureau, the piano, and a screened-off corner for the washbasin, but he led her into the little square of floor between the bed and the shuttered windows.

  On top of the bureau the gramophone waited, lid raised. Thomas wound the crank, pushed the lever, and dropped the needle. The song was “Saddest Tale,” Duke Ellington’s big-band blues; it started with a cry from the clarinet that rose like a breaking wave to start off a slow, heart-thudding rhythm. “Do you want to dance?”

  She looked anxious. “I do not dance.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “I am always at the piano, remember? Try.” He opened his arms to her, the gesture marking the slow, stepping rhythm, and guided her into position. “That’s it,” he said. “Now just follow.”

  The rhythm was languid, yet the song was anything but simple. Every chorus kicked off a new set of chord changes—one reason he had been listening to it, that and the deep, tinny sadness of the bass-scored trombones. Now he was just glad of the pulled-out beat that let him draw the length of her close to him.

  Duke’s mournful voice came through, so soft it was almost a bubble from the depths, speaking the song’s few lyrics: Saddest tale told on land or sea is the tale they told when they told the truth on me. She stumbled and he caught her easily. “Step on my feet. That’s right, just like that. You’re so light.” And he got her moving with him, finally. He could feel her reticence beneath his hands, the little quiver under her skin, so he kept his arms strong but loose around her. He would wait for her.

  They stepped apart when the song ended, both a little scared. She busied herself looking through the music on the piano. “What’s this?”

  “Charts and scores for the band’s songs.”

  “And this?”

  “Som
ething I made up.”

  “What’s meaning, made up?”

  “Wrote. Invented.”

  “Play it,” she said.

  So after resting a microsecond on the low D-flat, he let go of the rippling, repeating pattern in the left hand he had used before, modeled at first on Liszt, now mutated into something new. His right hand sang with his melody, simple and unexpected in its counterpoint against the complexity of the left.

  Then with no warning his right hand started something new, a melody he had not tried before, which came from nowhere and belonged to that moment, making it as much hers as his. As he followed it, the melody became everything he had wanted to show her, his little family of Mother and his grandparents and his father, who had died, and then his mother going too, leaving him. That was pain, and it circled around the melody in every kind of way, crying of loss and sadness. And then, as if following the movements of a sonata, he broke into the passage that answered those cries with resolve and harmony. Here was his odyssey across America, the land for which his father died. He traversed the sweet, tangled woods of Maryland and Ohio, the velvet-block fields of the Midwest, the sheets of sunlight over alpine meadows atop the Rockies, then Seattle, Shanghai. When he came to the last phrase and the final, tonic D-flat chord, home again, it sounded the deep bump of their lighter against the wharf, the magic moment they disembarked, he and Lin, the beginning and the end. He let the note hang and then rested his hands in his lap until the drumming of rain once again filled the room, nothing else. He had played as well as ever before.

  And improvised. It was a simple feeling, clear as a bar of light on the wood floor, and it had something to do with her being there.