Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Keo stood numb, fingers squeezing the handle of his trumpet case. The commandant paused before him, snapping his fingers; a soldier ripped the case from Keo’s hand, dumping out his trumpet. They did the same with Dew’s saxophone. The commandant stared silently at the brassy, flagrant instruments, then shone his flashlight in Keo’s face.

  “I am not a fan,” he said in precise English, “of your Hottentot music.” His voice turned soft. “But I am curious.”

  Almost gently he inserted his swagger stick between Keo’s legs, lifting it until it pressed against his genitals.

  “Tell me, when you make this noise, this so-called jazz, does it excite you?”

  He moved the stick back and forth in a fondling way. The flashlight moved to Keo’s groin. “Do you become . . . aroused?”

  Keo concentrated on the stick, waiting for excruciating pain. The commandant laughed, snapped his fingers again. Behind him the soldier stiffened, pointing his gun at Keo’s chest. He heard the ocean in his skull. . . . I’ve shit in my pants. How sad a dying thought it was.

  A shadow suddenly leapt from the platform in front of the train and started running down the tracks. The rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns. An old German woman on Keo’s left fell babbling to her knees. The commandant spoke to her in German, gently lifting her to her feet. People prayed out loud.

  Beyond his own foul smell, Keo smelled Dew’s sweat beside him, wild and rancid. He could hear Dew breathing like a running dog. The flashlight swept to Dew’s face. Sweat poured down his cheeks, and stood like pearls in his frizzy hair.

  The commandant leaned toward him, then recoiled. “God, you mud races . . . STINK!” He shoved a handkerchief to his nose.

  A soldier prodded a child in a woman’s arms. A dead infant, probably stuffed with bullets, a map. They wrenched the corpse from her, and hit her in the stomach. She spat in the face of a soldier. The rat-a-tat-tat again. An old man was pushed to his knees, then dragged by guards to a truck, his eyes huge, begging Keo to help him. A couple passed before them, prodded by guns. By daylight more than sixty people had been pushed aboard trucks. Refugees, saboteurs, the innocent.

  At 8 A.M. the officers went away for breakfast, then returned, belching and bored. Passengers had been standing there for more than sixteen hours. A whistle blew. Soldiers barked, ordering the crowd to board. Dew and Keo knelt, gathering their instruments. Then they moved toward the train in little hesitating steps. They boarded, sat side by side, staring straight ahead.

  The train coughed and snorted, jolted once or twice, then slowly moved forward, soldiers grinning in the windows, waving them goodbye. Even as the train accelerated, trees and meadows coming into view, they never moved, not an eye. Later, Keo heard Dew beside him, teeth chattering as he sobbed, both of them still staring straight ahead.

  When he could move, when he finally dared to, Keo glanced out the window. A cloudy day. Yet the landscape almost blinded him. He saw life, the pure miracle of life—its ancient realms, its vast jeweled portals—wherein each human stood suspended in his moment. He saw it as if for the first time.

  To be alive, he thought. To be allowed to live!

  MAHUKA

  To Flee

  HE RAN DOWN HIS NARROW MONTMARTRE STREET AS IF HE HAD never seen it, as if he must memorize it. He stood before the mildewed façade of his building wanting to embrace it, embrace each scalloped step of five warped flights. He bathed, took her in his arms.

  “Oh, Sunny,” he whispered. “How much I love you!”

  Half awake, she turned to him.

  “I want to marry you. Today. I want us to have children.”

  She sat up, instantly alert.

  “We’re going home. The hell with jazz, I’ll drive a bus in Honolulu.”

  “Keo. What happened?”

  He shook his head, unable to describe it.

  “I can’t go back,” she said softly. “Remember?”

  “Sunny, things are closing in.”

  “. . . Couldn’t we move to Switzerland?”

  He smoothed his hand across her shoulder. “It’s a desert for jazz.”

  “What about Spain?”

  “The war is there. It’s everywhere.”

  He spent days staring from his window, thinking of innocent old couples dragged to trucks. The swagger stick between his legs. The O of the mouth of the machine gun pointing at his chest.

  Seiko kept his word and found Dew a berth on a ship out of Marseilles. Dew begged them to leave with him and, after one sad, boisterous night at Brême’s, he was gone. Keo was so depressed he didn’t play for days.

  “No more crossing borders,” he told Seiko. “I’m no hero, I would have given them your name.”

  Seiko made it up to him, assigning simple errands. He spent time with Keo and Sunny, sensing they needed someone older to confide in. She told him about Lili, the sister she had never met. She wondered what her life was.

  “If she’s pretty, she’s probably in a Shanghai brothel.” His words like slaps across her face. “If she’s crippled as you say, she’s begging in the streets.”

  He took her hand. “Forgive me. You mustn’t deceive yourself. To look for her would break your heart.”

  “One must have hope,” Sunny cried. “To give up hope is greedy. It’s dishonorable.”

  One bright, frigid day they found Brême’s studio a mess, valuable paintings slashed in their frames, chairs gutted, spilling kapok. Musicians and their women gathered, waiting for him like children. After a week, near freezing, they started burning things in his fire-place, shredded journals, fishnets, wooden picture frames. One day two Rom Gypsies in the doorway in dark felt hats, profiles like hawks gliding on thermals. They pried floorboards aside, shoved firearms into canvas bags.

  “Where is Brême!” Keo shouted.

  They looked down. They shook their heads and crossed themselves.

  The burning continued, gutted mattresses, wooden bed frames, ticky-tack souvenirs. They burned everything. All that was left were memories of a sheer, inviolable space. They spoke his name, he who had been their source of coherence, their unity. In mother tongues, they prayed. Then they headed for port towns, the Spanish border, anywhere that led to ships headed to their homelands.

  Sunny began dreaming, a woman calling her for help. She woke crying for her mother. And she began to understand she and Keo could disappear in a minute.

  Sometimes she watched him sleep, his lip bleeding and crusty from too much playing, from not knowing how to stop. She touched his dark, smooth cheeks, long black lashes, ran her hand along his stubbled chin. Except for Seiko’s errands, she had no work now, no prospects. . . . Our lives depend on a horn. Some days she felt insane, jealous of the trumpet. She thought of crushing it flat, donating it as war metal. She thought of razoring Keo’s lips while he slept. Then she would have to nurse him, she would have his full attention. Without him, she felt she had nothing to live for, no bright shining cause.

  By Christmas 1940, Americans were being ordered out of France. They went to the American Embassy where there was a waiting list of weeks, and all ships sailed directly to the East Coast of the U.S. mainland. Yasunari Seiko said he could help them get out, but it would take time.

  “Meanwhile, we have many projects.”

  They started running “errands” again, trading jewelry for black-market medicine. ID photos left in a cigarette pack at Café de Flore. Forged papers sewn into a beret. Sunny moved like a pro, never pausing, not looking back. Sometimes she thought about getting caught, being interrogated. Then I would know what I am really made of.

  In early spring a package arrived, postmarked so many times, its stamps were almost illegible. German censors had sloppily retaped it, so half the contents were falling out. A smashed jar of plums. A Chinese doll with a shattered face. A stained and crumpled letter from the silk-mill girl, April Bao, who had found Sunny’s sister in Shanghai. Her sister, Lili, knew some English but not enough to write. She had embroidered the silk doll-
gown for Sunny. She prayed one day they would meet.

  April Bao wrote how bad things were. Japanese and Chinese troops fighting just outside Shanghai. A whole block had been bombed, thousands dead. There were Germans there, and Russians, Jews, and many French. They called Shanghai the Paris of the Orient. She wondered, did they grow silkworms in Paris? Did chemists sell tiger hearts for cholera? Did people wear nosebags in the streets? What were the fashions? She asked if Sunny could send a tube of lip rouge, and for Lili a piece of lace. The rest of the letter was censored in blackout.

  She sat holding the shattered doll against her chest. At night she tucked it in, like an infant. She kept the news from Keo, needing to absorb things, to decide. When she faced him, she wanted to be strong.

  One night she handed him the doll. “I found my sister, Lili.”

  He shouted. His hand flew to his mouth. He put his arms round her, held her in his lap while she read him the letter.

  “I’ve had dreams,” she said. “I thought it was Mama. It’s Lili, calling me for help! I need to get her out of Shanghai, to someplace safe. Even back to Honolulu.”

  He understood. He thought he understood. “Sunny. Shanghai’s halfway round the world.”

  “I traveled halfway round the world to be with you.”

  Patiently, he tried to explain. “That was over a year ago. Now Italy’s in the war, the Mediterranean’s closed. We’d have to sail round Africa, five or six extra weeks—”

  “People are doing it.”

  “It’s very dangerous.”

  “Life is dangerous. Keo, I’ve been living for myself. Selfishness has to stop here.”

  He sat up thinking half the night, trying to be rational. By morning, he had made a resolution.

  “There’s only one right way to do this. We’re going home as man and wife. That way your father can’t hurt you. And it is what I’ve wanted. We go to the embassy, get on a waiting list, a ship to New York City. Then a train to the West Coast, another ship to Honolulu. Sure. It could take months. There’s no other way. Once we’re home, we start processing papers, get your sister out through proper channels.”

  She stared at him. “By then, she’ll be dead.”

  They argued back and forth for days.

  While he played in cabarets, Sunny walked the streets, ignoring curfew, thinking of her sister. One night she stood in the shadows in a club watching Keo perform, his face dark with the ecstasy of blowing, eyes gazing far beyond the crowd. Something kicked her ribs, something turned over. In that moment she understood he would never be able to give her as much as he gave his music. She could never compete with his horn.

  For three nights running she watched him, watched over him, while he slept. Her lips moved as if she were praying. One day at dawn she unwrapped a Burmese ruby a woman had traded for ration stamps. She went to the steps of Sacré Coeur swarming with black marketeers, and sought one she had come to know. She went every dawn, bargaining, until she found the right offer. Paying exorbitant fees, she was registered near the top of a waiting list for passage on a ship. She put her documents in order.

  One night she begged Keo, “Take me dancing. I just want to hold you, and dance.”

  Dressed in their smartest clothes, they danced—waltzes, tangos, paso dobles. He didn’t even know what they were dancing: his feet seemed to follow hers. Her eyes were so big that night, her whole face seemed taken up with eyes. She gave off heat, her body glowed. He held her, thinking, She has never looked so beautiful. Nothing more could be added, nothing subtracted.

  They closed every dance hall, dancing furiously, destructively. Later, when she came to him naked, her passion had that same furious desperation. At dawn, while he slept, she sat beside him weeping, then touched his face, picked up her China doll, and left. At Brest she boarded a freighter facing a long, circuitous journey to the South China Seas.

  Keo woke in early afternoon, his arches painfully sore. A note was taped to the mirror. He approached it slowly.

  CONTRAPUNTO OF GUNSHOTS. SEARCHLIGHTS TRIANGULATING. The WHOOMPH! of distant bombs. He walked streets where everyone looked like they needed an ambulance. Hungry whores working out of alleys took margarine for payment. Children lived on garbage. A city becoming a memory. Maybe Paris had never been real for him—just background while he blew his horn waiting for Sunny. She had driven him out into the world, saved him from the temptation of defeating himself. She had helped him ripen, define himself as a man.

  Yet, he knew the measure of a man was his willingness to shoulder responsibility. His meagerness had let her down, and in that way Keo felt he had let himself down. In darker moments, he thought maybe there was no sister. Maybe Sunny had just wanted to be free of him. He lied to himself, so he wouldn’t have to admit he had let loose in the world the one thing he had meant to protect.

  He met with Seiko, offering all his money, even his horn, for passage on a ship, a freighter.

  Seiko shook his head. “Shanghai? You will never find her there. You will not be prepared for such a place.”

  Still, Keo has been kind to his nephew Endo. Not everyone in Paris had been kind. Now the boy was gone, forced to return to Japan and train for the Imperial Japanese Army. To show gratitude, Seiko reluctantly agreed to help him.

  “Though, waiting lists are endless. Thousands of Jews seeking refuge in Shanghai. All other countries have closed their doors.”

  He put Keo on a list. Meanwhile there were still errands.

  “. . . a family hiding out on Rue Margot, the child needs penicillin. And there is this gold watch needing to be sold. And this snapshot needing duplication . . .”

  Now even the best cabarets were half empty. Fewer musicians, fewer instruments available. Drums were smashed by French Hitler Youth bullying their way through the city. Pianos broke down, the tuners in prison camps. Most clubs were lit by candlelight or generators fed by exhausted pedalers in basements. Some nights Keo took the stage alone, hoping a few sidemen would turn up. He blew like a man possessed, exerting such pressure that his lips were open and raw, sometimes bleeding down his chin. To blow less was deprivation.

  One night, soloing “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” he chased himself in chorus after chorus, long glissandos up and down the scale requiring seemingly superhuman wind and control. He felt so lonely, so bereft, he couldn’t stop, or even slow down. He kept going, climbing the register to a C note, then, incredibly, an F.

  He felt his chest stretched so tight, a lung was marked forever. He tried to climb higher. The note he was going for didn’t exist. Women screamed as blue electricity shot out of his hair. Germans cheered. Momentarily blinded, he went down. When he came to, a German officer was wiping his face with scented linen. Pale, slender fingers covered with blond pollen.

  Keo punched him away with his fists, and staggered to his feet. Insulted, the German returned to his table and gathered his friends. They raised their glasses, saluting Hitler. The crowd jumped to their feet, returning the salute. Keo lifted his glass and ceremoniously poured its contents on the floor. The Germans left, and in the silence someone laughed.

  Keo turned on them. “You Frenchies fuck off, too! You smug bastards act like this war’s got nothing to do with you.”

  His behavior grew more blatant and aggressive. Later that week, standing at the bar, he tripped a German officer and laughed. Club engagements dwindled, owners were afraid. He volunteered for more of Seiko’s “errands,” running maps, a razor, and a .38 to a downed British pilot hiding in a boucherie. He sat with the pilot all night, drinking bootleg brandy between sweating sides of hanging beef.

  “I could be setting you up for the Gestapo,” he said. “How do you know I’m the good guy?”

  The pilot frowned. “Because you haven’t killed me yet.”

  For seven hours he helped partisans take fingerprints of eighteen massacred Gypsies dug up from a shallow grave.

  He played with whoever he could find, in bedrooms, a bakery, a chapel. Life was reduced
to errands and pacing his room, waiting for passage to Shanghai. Some nights he sat up in the dark. If only he had known how to be equal to her. He had let their life flow past, had wasted it. What was it he lacked? He had wanted to experience everything, learn everything. Yet that was what was missing: he saw he had not learned enough, had not been quick enough.

  Fatigue weighed heavily; it stemmed from the inability to know. What should I have done to save her? It haunted him. Sunny had surrendered everything to come to him. Then she had surrendered even the meager security of him, their life together, to go beyond, to another extreme. I never understood. Something in her had to be expressed.

  He started collecting illegal ration cards, wolfing down black-market eggs and steaks to keep up his strength for the voyage. Not wanting to look fugitive or desperate, he washed his socks, underwear, shirts, in his sink, flattening them out wet on the top of the bureau in lieu of an iron. He polished his shoes with the back side of the sheet, remembering his mother’s horror of top sheets, an old Hawai‘ian phobia of being wound in a shroud like the dead. He pressed his trousers by folding them neatly under his mattress. His health and appearance became his obsession. But sometimes, seeing his reflection in windows, Keo saw someone looking half insane, a man caught in the maelstrom.

  “You look frightful,” Seiko told him. “Relax. Learn to be a blank-face.”

  He practised keeping his expression deceptively bland. When passing German officers, he looked down, slumped his shoulders docilely, while yearning to rip out one of their eyes, squash it underfoot until he heard it POP!

  He bartered surplus cigarettes for a bar of good soap, then, heading home, found himself in front of the Louvre. He was still uneducated to the beauty of things—great operas, great paintings. But in that moment Keo hung his head for all the fragile beauty that was scattered from this place, some of it lost forever. He thought of Sunny packing treasures, of how one night he helped transport them across the countryside in trucks. He gave thanks then. For a short time, he had stood in the flow of history. He had been a fragment of that flow.