Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  “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 b
land 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.”

  “Here?” said Song, looking around the village meeting room, with its clay walls and rustic wood roof.

  “Otherwise she will die. She has only a short time.” Wei was terse and crisp now, the scientist, as she set out a tray of instruments for Song to sterilize with long-handled tongs. “Then you will hand them to me with the sterile tongs.” Bright lights were brought in and arranged around the farm table, towels and gauze and bandages and suture thread laid out according to rapid-fire instructions. Dr. Wei scrubbed her hands furiously with caustic soap and made Song do the same; they covered their hair and wore masks from her medical bag.

  “Get her family out of here,” said the doctor, and the village women hustled them out while she shaved the girl’s head, swabbed it with iodine, and braced it between rolled towels.

  “What if she wakes up?” Song whispered.

  “She won’t.” Wei was sectioning back the skin on the girl’s head. “We have to relieve the pressure.” The doctor used a hand drill to cut through the child’s skull, periodically issuing brief commands to a terrified Song.

  The instant she removed a section of the skull, the tissue inside bulged out through the opening. “Dura mater,” said Dr. Wei, as if she were a professor, and took a scalpel to cut through it. It was surprisingly tough and leathery-looking. The first slice freed a gush of blood and clots, and she could hear Dr. Wei exhale in relief as the spurting blood released its death grip on the brain. Then the surgeon moved on to the torn bridging veins that had caused the buildup of blood in the first place between the dura and the arachnoid, the layer below—first clamping, then repairing them. Long, tense minutes went by. Several times the family opened the door, and were scolded away.

  Finally Dr. Wei said, “That is the end of it. Ready to close up.” This part seemed easy for the doctor, and she chatted about the complications of head injuries as she worked, finishing with a clean bandage.

  By the time they went to the outer room to talk to the girl’s parents, Dr. Wei seemed energized, and ready to explain everything to the parents, whether they understood it or not. “The bridging veins were torn by the head trauma, and they poured blood into the space between the skull and the brain, pressing on it. The pressure was the threat; it would have killed her. Now that it is relieved, and she is stable, she should survive. We have to wait for her to wake up to know more.”

  “Aren’t you going to give them special instructions?” Song said when the parents had left the room.

  “Instructions?” Dr. Wei looked at her. “No. We are going to stay here. She must be watched.” And though Song offered to stay with the unconscious girl while the surgeon rested, this too Dr. Wei brushed off, and sat by the child herself.

  In the end they remained in Baoding Village for five days, until the child was well enough to ride back to Yan’an with them for postoperative care. During those days, Dr. Wei saw all the villagers with health complaints.

  In their makeshift clinic, a little gang of four girls, headed by the bossy Plum Blossom, turned up every day to help. When they closed the door in the evening, the girls cleaned everything and asked questions, wanting the use of all Dr. Wei’s tools explained to them.

  Like most village children, they were illiterate, and the second night Song said, “Would you like to have lessons?” They responded in an eager chorus, and every night, when the clinic closed, they worked on characters. Song wrote them out in stages for each girl so they could practice without forgetting the stroke order. To her surprise they loved it, wanting to stay late and learn more, and every morning they came in with their characters memorized. They were ravenous to read. It was not something that had been planned or scheduled, yet it turned out to be the most useful and joyful thing she had experienced since she came north.

  On their last night in Baoding, Song carried a tray of food in to Dr. Wei. “You give so much of yourself,” she said admiringly.

  Dr. Wei looked up, surprised. “No. It is what your people are doing that will change things. Do you realize—these villagers have never seen a doctor! Just like most peasants in China. No one ever brought medical care to them before—no emperor, no leader—not until you people came. Those girls had never been taught their characters either! That’s why I’m here, you know. That’s why I believe in what you are doing.”

  And in the truck the next day, watching the doctor cradle her patient on the ride back to Yan’an, and thinking of Plum Blossom and her friends, Song knew that she believed too. Their movement was the future. Maybe it was meant to be greater than love.

  Thomas and David were soon playing six days a week. They developed a following, folks who showed up to listen as they moved from one shabby, war-worn lobby to another, the Metropole, the Astor House, the Palace, and Le Cercle Sportif Français, which was not a hotel but a country club. At each place, they asked for the same deal, a full meal in the restaurant for each of them, and then, when the establishment was happy with the stream of patrons and the busy lobby service, they asked that the meal be
transferred to David’s wife and son. Thomas saw how David lit up when they came in, his wife in white gloves and her grandmother’s necklace, the boy in short pants and socks and a little blazer, clumping in his childish oxfords as if nothing had changed, as if they had not lost their world forever, along with everyone in it.

  Yet in playing with David, Thomas saw that the Epstein family and the other refugees in their community had brought some of their world here with them. He felt it every time the aging couples got up from their velvet-trimmed chairs and took a turn around the floor. The two musicians traded a look the first time they saw it, and the next time they met, without words having been necessary, David brought with him Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante and one of Strauss’s New Vienna Waltzes. It worked. More and more men started taking their wives’ hands, and once two or three pairs were out there, more tended to follow. The lobby became a dance floor, smiles jumping from one to another, from old to young. As they turned on the floor, he noticed their faded sleeves still bore the outline of the Star of David patches they had worn back home, yet here, dancing, all of them looked happy again.

  The crowds grew, and in July, Morioka also began to appear where they were playing—never directly, but by engaging in meetings nearby. It happened too often, and at too many hotels, for it to be an accident. The Admiral did not speak to them, since to do so might put the musicians in danger from the resistance, and Thomas appreciated his restraint. He did not mind that the man came to listen, even though Song would be furious if she knew; to him, music was a separate country, within which war was set aside. And actually, the one time Morioka did speak to them, it was only to ask about David. “Where come from your friend?”

  “Admiral Morioka, David Epstein. Mr. Epstein is from Vienna.”