by Nicole Mones
Yoshieki bowed, clicked his heels, and left.
9
NINETEEN FORTY AND forty-one passed, two years that were hard on Anya Petrova. The Dark World was an occupied city, which no longer attracted international men looking for a sweetheart on whom to spend money the way it once did. The first few years after the Japanese takeover in the fall of ’37 had not been so bad, but once all Europe was at war, it seemed the only people in Shanghai with money to spend were Japanese.
In the summer of 1941 she and her friend Li Lan began seeing high-placed Japanese, in secret, since anyone consorting with the conquerors was automatically in danger. They traveled separately to the Japanese sector in Zhabei and met their clients in private spaces, never entering or leaving with them. But the men, military officers, were polite, certainly better than the Nazis, who had been making their presence felt in Shanghai for many months. Next to them, her Japanese escorts seemed desirable.
Anya had her opinions, but her friend Li Lan had a whole different range of motivations—and she had to be twice as careful as Anya, since she slept with Japanese men for another, much riskier reason: she worked for the resistance.
On November 15, 1941, at a Zhabei jazz club, the two of them sat on the floor, on the tatami mats favored by the invaders. Their private room was separated from the club by a sliding rice-paper wall, which kept out prying eyes but not the strains of the jazz quintet from Osaka. Li Lan’s date was Major General Shibatei Yoshieki, the Japanese Army’s spy chief. He had brought along the top-ranking Japanese in Shanghai, Admiral Tadashi Morioka. Yoshieki knew Morioka loved jazz, so he booked this restaurant and asked Li Lan to bring along the gray-eyed, black-haired Anya as a companion for his friend.
Morioka seemed to have scant interest in her, although he listened intently to the music. He mostly spoke to Yoshieki in Japanese, leaving Anya out.
But not Li Lan. Her Japanese was fluent. Her grandmother was Japanese, and she had grown up in the north, speaking the language at home, a fact she concealed with great care. If Yoshieki and Morioka had any idea she understood them and had come here to mentally record every word they exchanged, they would see her put to death at once. Anya accordingly sparkled with just enough womanly conversation to cover her friend and allow her to follow their discussion, which rose in a heated crescendo before leveling off.
So when Li Lan touched her leg lightly under the table and said, in English, “Please excuse us to restroom,” Anya knew she wanted to say something about the intense volley of Japanese they had just heard. Yoshieki and Morioka barely noticed their rise from the table.
The Chinese girl closed the bathroom door and leaned close. “They were talking about someone you were with. Thomas Greene. Remember? It’s him, isn’t it?
“What?” Anya knew he was still in Shanghai, playing with a Jewish violinist. “Why would they speak of him?”
Li Lan moved right up to her ear and dropped her voice further. “Something is about to happen. It is something Morioka has known about for a while, and Yoshieki just found out, that is why they were talking. I don’t know what it is, but it is big, and very bad for Americans. Yoshieki asked Morioka if he was going to warn Thomas Greene before it was too late. Morioka became angry at him, and said of course not, the operation is top secret.”
Anya’s mouth opened in surprise. She kept her voice as soft as Li Lan’s. “Could they possibly be planning to attack the International Settlement? But then America would retaliate—”
“I don’t know what they are preparing,” said Li Lan. “Only that it’s about Americans. So if you can find a safe way, and you want him to live, you had better tell him.”
Anya squeezed her hand in thanks. They shared a deep breath, reapplied their lipstick, retraced their steps to the sliding screen, and sat again, smiling.
That year, Alonzo and Keiko decided to host an American-style Thanksgiving in their flat, and Thomas went to Hongkou to invite the Epstein family, and explain the holiday.
“You came so far in this war, started life over in a new land,” he said. “It’s something like it was for those first settlers who arrived in America. To survive was their victory; it was enough. They might have starved, but the Indians helped them. So at the harvest they had food, and everyone sat down together, and gave thanks. And that’s why we eat together on this holiday.”
“So this is your people coming to America,” David said.
“Yes,” said Thomas.
“But you were slaves, is it not?”
“Well, it’s about the other people, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because we are all in Shanghai now, and you three have your freedom.” His gaze gathered in David and Margit and Leo, now a solemn boy of five. “So please, come to Thanksgiving.”
They did come, and when they first climbed the stairs and walked into Alonzo’s apartment, they were made speechless, not by the dining table, which was loaded with all Keiko’s best dishes and a whole fragrant roast chicken, that being as close as they could come to a turkey, but by the large windows, framed with curtains, showing all the lights in the houses up and down the lane. To the Epsteins, after years in their little room, the simple glass panes were a fairyland of light. They stood there gazing out, laughing and exclaiming in their own language, which pleased Thomas.
He had played with David all through 1940 and 1941, and had long since accepted the Viennese as his brother. He still worried about the family’s safety, though so far the only restriction the Japanese had placed on the Jews was to require all the refugees—they now numbered more than 25,000—to live in Hongkou, where almost all of them were living anyway. The Nazis tried to organize a boycott of businesses employing Jews, but no one paid much attention to it, and if, in the end, a few Aryans ceased to patronize these companies, their absence was hardly felt. Shanghai’s Jews were surviving, even thriving. At the same time, their relatives back in Europe were going silent, their letters suddenly ceasing. If the long arm of Berlin managed to reach Shanghai, Thomas knew the same thing would happen here.
But now he had more immediate worries—Anya’s warning.
He had not seen her in over two years, when she fell into step beside him the evening before, as he left the Majestic Hotel. “Anya?”
“Let us walk like old friends. Do not make a fuss.” And she dropped her voice, and told him what she had learned.
“And you don’t know what Japan is going to do?”
“No. Only that the Americans are in danger. They argued about Morioka warning you.”
“I can see the buildup, all of us can. But no one knows what it means.”
“It means you should leave,” she said.
“I wish I could.” He took her hand as they walked, a simple gesture from the past, instantly retrieved. “I can’t. I don’t have the fare. And my friends don’t either, and I can’t leave them anyway.” He stayed for Song too, but he would not mention that now.
“I understand.” That was all she said, and when they reached the next intersection, she turned away, as if walking next to him had been a random accident.
He remembered how he had taken a few steps forward through the crowd before he realized Anya had vanished. Now, standing by the window before Thanksgiving dinner, he sent gratitude to her too, since she had taken a risk to warn him. Never mind that he could not act on it.
When the feast was laid out, they pulled their chairs around the table, linked hands for a prayer, and began the happy passing of platters.
In addition to roast chicken, Keiko had made rice and eggplant braised in miso, and hot and sour Korean-style cabbage. When they were finished and David was tamping and puffing on his pipe, Alonzo took out a guitar and started to play a circular twelve-bar blues, a direct, unconscious pattern. Thomas sat back in the chair, listening, giving thanks for the music in addition to everything else. Alonzo caught his eye and sent him the smile of the older friend, knowing, accepting, lighting the long path of the years ahead with his benediction: It’s
all right. Somehow it will work, and one day you’ll be as old as I.
After a few minutes Ernest unlatched his case and lifted his tenor from its worn velvet bed, dampened the reed, and mouthed it; then he began to blow atop Alonzo, crying, complaining in short bursts like comments on the guitar lines. Finally Charles took up his alto and joined in, first shadowing his brother in their trademark thirds and later playing off him in their own call-and-response.
Everyone in the room pulsed together, Leo in his mother’s lap, Thomas on the chair, Keiko—any sense of separate nationhood had dropped away. This was Shanghai, itself an eclectic improvisation, a loop like this twelve-bar blues, playing again and again, bringing all possibilities to life.
At last David rose and unsnapped his violin case. Thomas felt pride burst out of him, for David had always said he would never improvise, that it terrified him. He looked unsure as he fit his beloved instrument to his chin, and the first few bars he played straight, the way he knew how to do it.
Alonzo shook his head. “Turn the beat around,” he said, and used the next measure to emphasize the displacement of accents onto the weak beats.
David understood instantly, and began again, adding the Gypsy plaintiveness for which he was so gifted. After a while he began to grasp their hesitations and use of space, and he left more emptiness as he answered their lines with his.
He said, “So you are flatting the third, the fifth—”
“And the seventh,” said Ernest.
“Judiciously,” Alonzo added.
And David nodded as his elegant violin shifted the song into something stranger and more mournfully European. Thomas saw Alonzo and Ernest exchange looks, interested. Gunfire sounded outside, and everyone glanced up, then returned to the music, used to the sounds of violence.
The song ended to cheers and laughter, and then Thomas, the only one of the musicians who had not played, spoke up. “My turn. Music is my nation, and you are my people.” He raised his glass. “This is our country, right here: America is in a song. We have just proven it. Thank you, pioneers.” And they all drained their wine.
The next day, November twenty-eighth, Admiral Morioka left the Japanese Naval Headquarters with a sheaf of freshly decoded documents in a small, stiff leather map case inside his greatcoat. He needed to think, away from the frenzy of cables, the clamoring subordinates. In a few weeks Japan would attack America, and his forces had to be positioned like a clamp around Shanghai, ready to tighten at exactly the same moment. Thousands of his men were garrisoned in the city, and thousands more waited in the rural districts surrounding it. It was essential that he quickly overwhelm the Marines and other foreign troops in the International Settlement, taking the British gunboat Petrel and the American gunboat Wake, moored in the Huangpu, as his first act. Then he would have his men move through the downtown streets en masse, executing any who offered resistance. And then it won’t be your Lonely Island anymore. It will be ours.
He would have all the Allied diplomatic personnel in the city detained at the Cathay Mansions in the French Concession, and keep them under house arrest. Their colonization of China was over. He would take the Shanghai Club from the British and turn it into a club for Japanese officers. And those garish bronze lions in front of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the ones whose feet poor superstitious Chinese rubbed for good luck, he would get rid of those too, just as soon as he had the British flag taken down and the Rising Sun hoisted in its place.
And then there were Shanghai’s eight thousand Allied citizens, British, American, and Dutch. As enemy aliens, they would have to wear numbered armbands in public and be barred from all places of entertainment such as restaurants, theaters, and clubs. Their bank accounts would be frozen, their assets seized. They would be restricted and pushed down until they were lower than the Chinese, and then, by January or February, he would have them all moved out of Shanghai and into prison camps. Their villas and apartments would be of use to him and his men.
It still troubled him to think of all this landing on the American musicians he so admired. But he was a man who held loyalty above all things, and breaching the extreme secrecy of this attack was out of the question.
He also believed deeply that Japan’s enterprise in taking China was a noble one. It would end British domination of Shanghai after 101 years. China had never been able to liberate herself from Anglo-Saxon tyranny; only Japan could do it. China would be free at last—and cared for, that being Japan’s duty as the natural leader of East Asia. The strong should care for the weak. It was correct.
But today’s cable from Berlin had sent him to his chauffeured car, to the back seat where he could not be seen, to tell his driver to take him past French Park. What to do? The bare treetops sketched questions against the gray sky, and he studied them as the motorcar rumbled past the park walls.
The Germans were furious that so many Jews were being allowed to live in Shanghai, allowed to work, provide for their families, and form a community. They wanted something done. It was a complaint to which he had always replied simply that Shanghai was under Japan’s control, not Germany’s. Now things had shifted; the pressure was no longer local. It was coming from Berlin.
He felt the weight of a thousand boulders on him. With their sneak attack about to draw the world into war, it was no time for him to put the alliance with Germany at risk. But Shanghai belonged to Japan, and the tribe of Israelites had flourished here. What was he expected to do, deny them the right to work? And what about the rich Sephardic Jews, like Sassoon and Kadoorie, pillars of the city who had been here since the nineteenth century and lived in vast mansions, off Bubbling Well Road? Surely they were to be excluded from the ugly intimations in today’s cable. His hand went to the leather document case inside his coat. The whole thing was impossible.
“Turn right,” he said when he saw the Cercle Sportif Français up ahead. Every Friday afternoon, Thomas played in the lobby below the grand curving staircases; to hear music would give him clarity. “Wait for me,” he said.
In the lobby, he ignored the barely audible intake of breath, still distracted by the conflict within him. Yet as soon as he heard the music floating across the polished floor, he was righted again. He walked closer, the violin and piano calming him, and took a seat.
The piece contained the world. Morioka found it so moving that he summoned one of the pinch-chested middle-aged men they called boys, who now quavered before him in fear.
“What name this music?” Morioka said, and the boy evaporated to find out. Usually when Thomas and David played, people danced, but today they filled the chairs and settees and all the space in between, listening as silently as he was. He closed his eyes to the music’s purity, and everything seemed clear. The maze in front of him was not so difficult; he would find his way through it. He would make the right decision.
When the movement ended, there was a pause, and he opened his eyes to see the Jew, David Epstein, nodding to the boy and writing something on a piece of paper. Then Thomas Greene caught his eye, and sent him a discreet nod, which he returned with a short bow, for they were masters to him, and war or no war, he venerated them.
A second later the boy was at his side, unable to stop the paper from shaking as he proffered it. The Admiral handed him a coin to get rid of him, and unfolded it.
Mozart, Sonata for Piano and Violin in B-flat, No. 454.
A rare smile touched his mouth. Mozart’s music was the pinnacle of European culture, and he had just heard a sublime interpretation by this David Epstein, a Jew. Nothing could have made it clearer to Tadashi Morioka that the Nazis were overreaching with their pressures.
He felt even more certain of it as he listened to the third movement, an allegretto full of light-filled, dancing runs, and when it ended, and a storm of applause erupted, he rose and walked out the lobby door. The winter sun was warm, and he felt at peace as he opened his greatcoat and touched the stiff leather document case inside. It was neutral now, the burn of anxiety gon
e from it.
He would not let the Germans push him, not when it came to his Jews.
Up in Yan’an, reports of the Japanese buildup around Shanghai poured in. The only part of the city not already under Japanese control was the Gudao, or International Settlement, for the Chinese had already been beaten, and France was a Nazi vassal state. In Yan’an, everyone thought the signs meant there was about to be an attack on the Settlement. There was no other explanation.
That did not mean there was much sympathy for the unfortunate Westerners who would be caught up in the attack, for they were dismissed as imperialists. The news sparked terror in Song that others did not share.
Alone, she worried about Thomas, for she had not been back to Shanghai since all three of them met there in ’thirty-nine—and that was two years ago. He might be gone, or he might be with someone else and not want to see her. But inside, she felt sure he was still there. And she had to warn him.
So she went before her superior to ask for family leave.
“You have family in Shanghai?” said Wu Guoyong, looking through her file. “I do not see that.”
“Friends.”
“Foreigners,” he said, and she did not deny it.
He turned a few pages. “You have never asked for leave before, and when family is in danger, we grant it. But—”
She just held her eyes on him and let her request stand.
He tapped the file with a sigh. “You know that travel to Shanghai has never been more dangerous than it is right now. Is it worth it?”
“Yes,” she said, putting everything she had on the word.
He glanced at a report. “You have done well. I see the children of Baoding Village are very fond of you.”