Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  She sat up, taking Keo’s hand. “That’s where she is, my sister who I’ve never seen. DeSoto helped me search, he took me to a silk mill. We found a girl named April Bao who thought she knew my sister. She remembered Lili’s clubfoot. But in three days we sailed again. I gave April Bao this address.”

  He could hardly grasp what she had done. He felt, in her telling, she was somehow measuring him.

  “DeSoto stayed with me till Bombay, when his ship turned back to Honolulu. I had left with only two hundred dollars. He paid for everything—passport, visas, passage on a connecting freighter. In times like these, people fleeing countries, trying to get home, it’s not so difficult. All it takes is money.”

  “And from Bombay . . . ?”

  “He entrusted me to the captain, a kind man who carried snapshots of his children. He locked me in my bunkroom for my safety, the first mate brought me meals. For weeks I was horribly seasick, I missed our journey through the Suez Canal. But every night strange men, the crew, sat outside my door, scratching with their nails, whispering what they would like to do to me. What they had done to others.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “. . . I had never imagined such physical things could be done to a woman. Each night while they whispered through the door, I could feel those things being done to me. It was a nightmare. . . . I don’t remember much until the coast of Italy. It seemed a miracle that I survived.”

  He opened and closed his fists as if molding her pain, her degradation.

  “DeSoto had cabled your Mr. Seiko. A couple met me in Trieste. My papers were dated wrong, police tried to detain me. The couple gave them money. Then riding in a butcher’s truck, its vibrations like bullets hitting my teeth. Then France . . . the woman flirting with border guards so they overlooked my papers. Changing cars, an old man in a rusty Fiat . . . and after many hours, Paris. I stood outside your club, terrified.” Her hand flew to her heart. “Then! Hearing your trumpet from the sidewalk . . .”

  Keo undressed, slid in beside her, still afraid to touch her, afraid to breathe. They stared, like two animals caught in a trap. Then thoughtfully she kissed his forehead, his cheek, his curly hair. All was new and must be slow. She kissed his lips, her fingers stroked brown shoulders. She sighed, and slept again.

  He backed off, feeling terrible constriction in his chest. He had remembered her face, her beauty, but had forgotten the impact of actual touch—how his brain quickened, how his skin pimpled from shocked roots. He cupped a pale, honey-colored shoulder, felt the bowl of bone beneath. He lifted a wrist, refined and imperturbable. Even her elbows were refined. Her skin, blushed silk.

  He studied a breast, the textured nipple, like an object he had never seen. Why did such a soft formation make him want to weep? Make his erection seem vulgar? He cupped both breasts, the nipples hardened, yet she slept. He inhaled her hair, her ears, her underarms, smelling salt, and rust, and female. He pulled her close, letting her wash across his senses.

  At noon she woke craving everything, a bath, a meal, him, mostly him. Covering his body with hers like a pelt. Hours later, wrapped in sheets, he sat her on his lap, pulling aside blackout drapes. White pollen dusted the city, Sunny’s first sight of snow. She reached out, catching and tasting crystals as sunlight roared down the street in thunderous chords. Somewhere, the bronze agony of ringing bells, a child’s cry muffled.

  He knew that outside the city conscripts marched, awkward in new uniforms. Heavy-hearted farmers led horses off for requisitioning. In dark confessionals priests dispensed forged papers to Poles and Jews and Gypsies. But just now, just here, they were safe. Life suddenly had depth and edge, a clarity. It almost hurt to look at things.

  “Our dream came true.”

  “I hope it won’t be brutal,” she whispered.

  Now morning, evening, night were measured by the extreme luxury of waking, the slowness of animal activities merging each with each. The uselessness of clocks, the liquid motion of unplanned hours. Each dawn he made forays to black marketeers, returning with melons, cheeses, warm croissants, tartes Tatins. Packets of real coffee, cigarettes. Shivering, they took the food in under old eiderdown comforters, sipping and chewing, lying back in buttery crusts. Convulsing and fainting together again. Waking with hips stained from jams and crushed tartes Tatins.

  Some days he dragged up his horn for her, his playing so heart-felt, so rich in vibratos, she felt it in her kneecaps, the back of her skull. His playing hung the room in jewels. As he warmed up, the room warmed up. All her life she would remember that place, five flights up a spiral staircase smelling of rancid butter. The room itself a sloping cube, a crumbling balcony leaning out from the tortured façade of the building. Clandestine gurgle of rusty pipes, walls sprouting estuaries of mold. And she would remember the extreme joy at finally being there with him, sure that the war would never come. Sure that these days, this city, even the sounds of his gleaming muscle of yellow horn, would go on forever, would never end.

  Keo was so moved, he felt physical pain. Some days his heart couldn’t seem to pump his blood, it couldn’t bear to. Other times it danced in its cradle of ribs. Sometimes he woke and lit a candle just to stare at her. As if by mystical articulation, Sunny turned, opened her eyes, and drew him to her. He was as gentle, as refined as he could be.

  But he was not always sure that was what she wanted. Sometimes he felt her pull aside, as if wanting to watch his ejaculation from a distance. As her own orgasm approached, Sunny looked terrified, like a woman about to be shot. Her eyes widened, her mouth hung open. Keo would start to slow, back off, and she would clutch him fiercely. Then spasms, clamor, her body fusing with his.

  He took her dancing at smart cabarets, La Lune Rousse, Le Lapin Agile, haunts of black marketeers and the rich. Strangers stared, trying to make out what they were. Keo, sleek and dark in evening dress, lips scarred like a gangster. Sunny, vaguely Oriental in the eyes, the black hair cut in a pageboy, the fortuitous pale gold skin. But something else, something sensuous in her full lips, rounded breasts and hips, an indefinable mingling of bloods. They looked like no other couple, which made them somehow vulnerable.

  Dew welcomed her like a sister. She brought back memories of a warm, gaudy island where he was still a raw recruit bursting with confidence. She hung Keo’s walls with ti leaves, which she had carried for safe journey, and old prints of torch ginger and heliconia. She made them jasmine tea with little floating petals. In bare feet she cooked them meals of tinned pineapple and black-market pork and rice. She taught them to say grace in Hawai‘ian.

  “Pule ho‘omaika‘i i ka papa ‘aina. ‘Amene.”

  She took them for walks along the Seine just to be near water, any water. She stood at black-market fish stalls, bargaining, stroking the bellies of tuna. She corrected their Pidgin French, took them for pedicures and haircuts, and found churches still providing heat where they could sit for hours. She was like a sudden balm in those mad days advancing in hunger and blows.

  Sometimes Sunny forgot what had happened. She would half wake, not knowing where she was. She would listen with dread for the sound of her father’s voice, then come fully awake and remember. . . . diving into Papa’s back . . . his flesh unseaming . . .

  She wept, recalling the plunging blade, her father’s Oh! as if he had forgotten something. Recalling his arms thrown up as if trying to fly. She remembered thinking it was the knife’s, not her father’s, blood. . . . Metals age, become fatigued. Couldn’t they bleed, as well? She remembered her mother’s mouth. Its silence. Her mother’s finger pointing. Telling her to go makai and makai and makai. Far away, across the sea. She did not even hug her.

  At such times Sunny felt not hate but horror. At what she had done to her father. What he had done, for so long, to her mother. Mostly, she was appalled at what men could do to women because they were physically stronger. She turned to Keo then, glimpsing his strong back, the muscled arms, and started to pull away. But in his sleep he reached for her, hands warm
as if bringing her euphorias of sunlight. She chewed and swallowed her father’s name.

  NOW THE CITY PULSED WITH HUMANS ON PSYCHOPATHIC ERRANDS. Bankers buried gold bricks in coffins, lowering the coffins into graves. Fur merchants bartered ermines and sables for a wheel of Brie. Folks drank ersatz coffee made of acorns, then strolled public parks stalking the swans, dragging their strangled corpses home. Pigeon traps sat on rooftops next to antiaircraft guns.

  In exchange for fresh produce, the concierge shared his wife with the greengrocer. Twice a week he stood in the hallway whistling while his wife and the grocer fornicated next to a cage where guinea pigs fattened. Sunny heard them squealing. Some days there was no motion, only eerie silence. Folks sat behind blackout drapes as reconnaissance planes flew over Paris. Bad weather, lack of equipment, held the Germans back.

  At first she would not acknowledge what was coming. As if on holiday, she dragged Dew and Keo to galleries where they studied Velázquez, the light of Titian and Vermeer. She stood in front of Braques and Picassos, explaining how Cubism reduced natural forms to abstract geometric forms. They stood inside Notre Dame staring at the rose window of the north transept, a whirling, flaming kaleidoscope forty feet across.

  “Jesus Christ,” Keo whispered. “It’s visual jazz.”

  In the Church of the Sorbonne they listened to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue.” Deeply moved, Keo hugged himself, remembering Oogh saying Bach was the jazz genius of his day.

  After a few weeks Sunny set up an easel and canvases, painting in early mornings while he slept and in the evenings while he played the clubs. She painted relentlessly hour after hour. Some mornings he watched her through half-closed eyes, her flowing brush-arm a dancer weaving color through his days.

  Before she arrived, the room had seemed a crypt for his tired bones. Now it palpitated chaos—drooling palette, half-stretched canvases, rags mitred stiff with paint. In old kimono, hair pulled back in a knot, Sunny bent over paintings with a marksman’s squint, executing hundreds of oblique strokes. As soon as she finished one, she turned it to the wall. Eventually, stacks of canvases edged the room, rounding off its corners.

  “Don’t look at them,” she said. “They’re awful.”

  One day he turned her paintings round, leaned close, and studied them. All painted in that geometric Cubist style. A flock of razor blades flying in formation. A head sliced up like a pie. Soaring wedges, shredded cubes. Pyramids of eyeballs. A man exploding into flesh squares, strangling a grinning child.

  Keo sat back, exhaling slowly. “Ho, man!”

  “Well . . . what did you expect?”

  He struggled, trying to articulate. “Dew once told me never play a note head-on. Never give it all away. Always try to ambush myself.” He stroked the edge of a canvas. “Sunny, there’s no ambush here. You paint your anger head-on. You pound your theme to death.”

  “I know I’m mediocre.” She said it softly. “Everything boils down to rage.”

  He took her in his arms. “I’m sorry. I love you so much I don’t know how to lie.”

  She kept painting, needing the chaos, the motion, the warding off of demons. And it was something she could control. The rest of their life seemed increasingly unreal. Paris kept changing day to day, like a city too quick for memory. In clubs and cabarets, crowds still drank themselves witless. But faces looked bland, as if made of wax. Some people looked featureless, trying not to call attention to themselves. In every crowd Gestapo sat quiet, posing as Danes, Norwegians.

  “How can you play for them?” Sunny asked. “Knowing who they are?”

  Keo shrugged. “We’re not politicians. We just play for who digs jazz.”

  “You are politicians. Jazz celebrates freedom. Have you forgotten that girl Gilda? Don’t you listen to the news?”

  She had begun following Hitler’s progress across Europe. During rehearsals she paced back and forth before the band, feeling faint revulsion at the maleness of it: men entertaining men who slaughtered.

  Keo tried to reason. “There’s no choice. We play or starve. Some of these Germans are okay. They bring us liquor, cigarettes, even get us bookings.”

  Sunny’s voice turned soft. “Keo, in every country that Germany has invaded there are trains full of people pulling out of stations. No one knows where they take them.”

  “Rumors. Folks are hysterical—”

  “What do you know of hysteria? Or terror? You’re blind to everything but jazz.”

  He sat back as if she’d struck him.

  “You men sit in clubs and blow your horns thinking you’re safe because some Nazi loves your music. When Hitler’s finished rounding up Poles and Jews and Gypsies, he’ll start on what he calls ‘mud races.’ You. And me. Have you thought of that?”

  She looked round the bar at black and brown faces—Guadeloupeans, Algerians, Rhodesians, Fijians.

  “My God, you’ll be sitting ducks when the tanks roll in.”

  When she talked like that, he backed away, seeing a trenchant side of her that frightened him—the side of her needing to challenge authority, set the world right. He thought of her father, and what she had committed defending her mother. He didn’t believe Sunny saw herself as heroic. It was just that she did not know how to walk away.

  She found work as assistant window dresser at Trois Quartiers department store. One day, dressing a dummy in a window, she watched a Gypsy girl in scarves and rags begging in the street. The girl approached, pointed to the bald, half-naked dummy, and laughed. Sunny tangoed it, cheek to cheek, round the window, then she pulled out a handful of francs, wondering how to give them to the girl. Two leather-coated men approached, backing the girl against the wall. Sunny watched their lips move. The girl shook her head back and forth, back and forth.

  One of them held his hand out as if asking for her papers. She cringed, trying to hide behind herself. The man hit her in the face. The other grabbed a handful of hair, yanking her to her knees. They continued yelling, she continued shaking her head. As they dragged her away, Sunny shouted through the window. When they didn’t hear, she banged on the window with the bald, wooden head of the dummy. Banging harder and harder until they turned.

  One of them walked back to the window, curious. Sunny waved her arms, shook her head emphatically no, pointing to the girl. He could not hear her words. He watched her lips move, her face full of rage. He said something to his friend, nodding at Sunny. The other paused, then shook his head no. The man stepped closer to the window, wagging his finger at Sunny in a warning way, then both of them dragged the Gypsy girl off. By the time Sunny got out to the street, they had disappeared.

  “I witnessed it,” she said. “And there was nothing I could do.”

  Keo shook her by the arm. “Never interfere like that again. You could have been arrested.”

  She turned to Etienne, in shock. “How in God’s name can we ignore what’s happening?”

  “There’s no room for God,” he said. “There’s hardly room for life.”

  She was drawn to Brême, feeling a kinship because of his mixed blood. Sometimes she sat in his studio listening to records of old native chants while he studied her, trying to figure her out. At first she had seemed cool and catlike with her delicate movements, her slanted eyes. Then he saw flashes of quick temper, a tough, probing mind. An almost bitter intelligence. He wondered how long she could take Keo’s life.

  To anyone but jazzmen and their casual women, it seemed a life of sloth and repetition. Sunny struck him as a woman meant for more than that. Something in her needed to be doing, needed to be rescuing, redeeming. And that was what she couldn’t see: how much Keo needed her, her nurturing. She thought of him as gifted, needing no one, driven by his horn. What Brême saw was a man born with a gift so rare and fragile it could expire quickly, because Keo lacked confidence.

  She strolled Brême’s studio, marveling at his collection. “Corot. Utrillo—is that an original? Gauguin, I never liked him. Renoir . . . Oh! Hiroshige.”
<
br />   He followed her, impressed. “You know a bit about art.”

  “I know a lot about art,” she said. “I’ve studied books, I’ve memorized paintings. Unfortunately, that’s what I do best.”

  “Have you tried painting?”

  “Oh, I dabble. That means ‘without serious intent.’ Dabbling reduces it to a hobby, so no one expects excellence.” She smiled philosophically. “I don’t pity myself, Etienne. There are worse things than being not-gifted. If I could just discover what I was meant for, I would be content.”

  “You were preparing for . . . medicine?”

  “That’s over. My life is mine now. I want to do something worthwhile.”

  He turned thoughtful. “I have something that might interest you. Give me a little time.”

  One night the men’s room of the Chat Noir Café was riddled with bullets: the burgeoning Underground Resistance had cornered a German spy. Then Dew learned two Negro jazz musicians playing in Copenhagen were now in prisoner-of-war camps. People were disappearing left and right. April now, Hitler predicting he would take Paris by May. Men sat in Brême’s studio and talked of heading home.

  “Go,” he said. “Before you end up hiding in sewers.”

  “What about you? They’re rounding up your people.”

  “I have errands here.”

  They had wondered if Brême were a Nazi sympathizer. German “Danes” drifted in and out of his studio, swapping Ella Fitzgerald for Sidney Bechet, playing Count Basie through the night. Keo had learned otherwise, that Brême was one of the Rom Gypsy partisans working against the coming Occupation. Rom knew the countryside, they trafficked in contraband, excelled in the art of invisibility.

  One night at the Halo Bar, Brême sat down with Sunny.

  “I’ve been thinking. My father is in restoration at the Louvre. I wonder . . . would you work for no pay, but maybe extra ration cards?”

  She gave him her full attention.