Or, he heard guitars, violins, Rom Gypsies dancing in lime green fields, celebrating life. Alegría! Men of ferocious courage, women of fire, people who lived with divine address, loving deep and inchoate things. He saw their caravans on fire, paint blistering their wagons. He heard machine guns, saw children bursting from fields like pheasants.
ONE NIGHT, RETURNING FROM CIRO’S AT 3 A.M., HE FOUND THE owner of Hotel Jo-Jo looking apprehensive.
“She’s been waiting in your room all night. . . .”
Asleep in his bed, the sheet severing her legs. Shadows tearing scoops of flesh from her shoulders. He flung himself across the room, burying his head against her breasts. She woke, taking him in her arms.
“Forgive me!” she whispered. “I didn’t know. . . .”
He crawled in beside her and held her, their bodies shaking, both sobbing like children. When they finally calmed down he switched on a lamp so he could see her.
“When you left I died. I swear, I died! I’ve searched these streets for months.”
Dark crescents under her eyes, her beautiful face haunted. Fear and hopelessness, and something else.
“Sunny. You’re so thin. . . .”
“Filth,” she whispered. “It kills appetite.”
“You should have waited. You should have let me come with you.”
Then he remembered she had waited. In Paris, she had begged him for weeks.
She sat up now in weary exhalation. “Keo, I found Lili. I found her—but I can’t get her out. The U.S. won’t let her come home with me.” She clung to him. “Help us. Help us, please. I can’t leave without her.”
“I’ve been to the embassy,” he said. “She’s considered Japanese. Forbidden to enter the U.S. or its territories. It’s hopeless. One day soon, they’ll evacuate Americans. You have to leave with me. We’ll try to get her out later.”
“I can’t. I can’t desert her.” She began to sob again. “I am not my father.”
Holding her, he felt bone, all her softness gone. Everything seemed corners. Even her breasts under her slip seemed flatter, as if this city, so covertly cruel, had pressed her into one dimension.
“What has happened to you? How are you living?”
At first she couldn’t answer. She hugged herself, her body trembling with emotion. Finally, her eyes met his. “Forgive me. I didn’t know. I never would have left you if I knew. . . .”
He felt a chill, felt his brain crank a little tighter.
“Knew what? What is it?”
In the silence, mosquitoes whined in their blood quest. The ceiling fan shuddered like something hurt.
“It took seven weeks to reach Shanghai. I was ill, day and night. The ship’s doctor examined me.” She hid her face in her hands. “I was . . . carrying our child . . .”
Keo sat very still.
“. . . almost three months pregnant when I left you. I didn’t know! She was born here, in August. So tiny and frail, but she’s alive.”
“Where is she?” He shook her by the shoulders. “My God, she’ll die in this filthy place. Where . . .” It was all too much. He wept again.
“She’s with Lili and her aunty, near the Bridge of Nine Windings. I couldn’t bring her, the air so full of bacteria. I wanted to tell you first. Keo, you must take our daughter home, safe to Honolulu. I’ll come with Lili after.”
He shook her violently again. “After? After what!”
He was not listening. He could not listen. He could not believe that they were living lives already so exhausted. When he quieted down, Sunny pulled him back into her arms.
“One day at dawn I gave birth to our daughter, with Lili and a midwife. Lili took her from my thighs. I brought life to my poor sister, whose only life has been the mills.”
She smiled, giving him clarity, and hope.
“She looks just like you. Her eyes, her perfect little mouth. I named her . . . Anahola. Time in a glass. I remembered your hands turning the hours while you practised your horn.”
He dropped his head against her chest. “Oh, Sunny. Take me to her. We’re a family now. We must go home.”
He heard the old intransigence again. The part of her that would not walk away. “I want to go home. To be with you. Live long, quiet days and quiet years. I’ve had enough of the world. But I can’t leave my sister. Please. Help me get her out.”
He held her tight, hatching impossible schemes. “A guy at Ciro’s knows someone who makes passports. They’d make one up for Lili. I know a Brit who’s sleeping with a woman at our embassy. Maybe she would help us. . . .”
At dawn they were still whispering, scheming, wondering how to save their lives, how to regain control of them. They made love frantically, desperately; it seemed even their bodies were beyond their control. While Sunny dozed, he tried to comprehend all she had told him, to comprehend that she was even there beside him, it was not a dream. . . a dream. . . .
When he woke at noon she was gone. He ran up and down the halls, his face screaming back at him from mirrors. His nerves disintegrating into salt.
The owner tried to reassure him. “She’ll be back. She said she’s bringing you the child. My friend, whatever you are planning, be quick about it. All who can afford to leave are clearing out.”
For three days and nights Keo sat in his room, waiting. Each hour moved across his flesh. Maybe she feared if she returned to Hotel Jo-Jo, he would force her on a ship with the child. Maybe the sister refused to give up the child, afraid Sunny would desert her. Maybe the child had died. Was there a child? By the fourth day he was crazed, running the streets like a madman. At the Bridge of Nine Windings, he searched, and searched, then sat babbling in an alley, telling beggars how he had lost her. He had let her go again.
After a week, he went back to Ciro’s. But every free moment, he searched, each fruitless search a horror. Now there was a child, and not to find her meant her death. He lived in the roar of his heartbeats, watching bare-bottomed men and women squat beside streams, uncoiling their excrement into the waters. Waters that bathed his infant daughter. He prayed, he bargained with God. He would give up everything, his horn, his life, if he could save Sunny and his child.
K‘INO
To Turn from Good to Evil
ONE MORNING, A MONDAY, HIS BED COLLAPSED, THE WALLS FELL in upon him. He grabbed his horn, covered his face, and staggered to the street. Tanks rode abreast, flattening everything in sight. Keo flung himself out of their path, watching battalions of Japanese marines with fixed bayonets running in formation. A motorcycle braked in front of him; a young Japanese officer stepped from the sidecar.
“You. Report to checkpoint for red armband.”
Keo stood dumb. “What is it? What’s happened?”
He slapped Keo hard across the face. “No obey, I kill you. Your thoughts and my thoughts now enemies.”
Retrieving his documents, he struggled through debris, making his way to Ciro’s where security guards kept a shortwave radio. Crowds were gathered, listening to the broadcast, and Keo watched in disbelief as folks attacked each other. A pattern emerged: people striking back at their oppressors.
A Chinese amah reached up, slapping a White Russian au pair. White Russians in turn seemed to be slapping Frenchmen. A sing-song girl pounded the chest of a red-turbaned Sikh policeman. The Sikh beat her off, then struck a shouting Englishman in golf pantaloons. The Englishman gasped, then slapped his sobbing wife. Mothers struck their children. Rickshaw coolies dragged uniformed chauffeurs from Buicks and Bentleys, beating their heads with metal pipes. An old woman with empty eye sockets sat in the dirt strangling a chicken.
In the madness, Keo heard static from the shortwave, voices fading in and out. “. . . PEARL HARBOR . . . PEARL HARBOR . . .”
He started running toward the Old City where Sunny lived. Crowds overwhelmed him, carrying him backward toward the Bund on Shanghai’s waterfront, where British and American warships were anchored. All around, enormous explosions. A building sat down. People s
urged in thousands, wave upon wave, not knowing where they were running.
In the harbor Japanese naval officers stood at attention on cruisers surrounding what was left of American and British warships. Flags of the Rising Sun now replaced the Allied flags. Keo pointed helplessly at sailors bobbing in flaming oil. An Englishman in a tailored suit cried out at the burning men, then turned and cursed a Japanese soldier. The soldier thrust a bayonet straight through his neck.
Down every street, he saw them taking over the city, marching in long columns of troops and light tanks, the same Prussian military goose step he had seen in France. In between troop columns, teeming mobs—whites and Orientals—ran frantically toward the Bund, looking for safety.
It was then, in the rushing assault of thousands of bodies tumbling over each other, that he saw her. An infant in her arms, dragging a limping girl beside her. He screamed her name. He scrambled up on the shoulders of strangers, and screamed her name. Over and over. Sunny turned, looked up, incredulous. He would always remember that moment, an inhalation, like a great intake of breath before the rapids. She beheld him, a tender radiance in her eyes. She reached her arms out with the child. She spoke his name. Shoulders collapsed beneath him, he went down.
HE WOKE IN A WARD SO CROWDED, PEOPLE DIED SQUATTING IN corners. His head hurt terribly, his vision was off, but one day he hobbled to a window. Shanghai was now a combat zone under Japanese domain. Troops, tanks, lookout posts manned by soldiers with machine guns. They busted up rickshaws, beating coolies so they exploded like bags of dust. Out in the harbor, lugubrious clouds of black smoke, half-sunken ships and sampans. The harbor paved with broken bodies.
A Swiss doctor with the stooped grace of a tired bird told him the United States had declared war. “Cheer up, a few weeks, you’ll be headed home on a repat ship.”
Mosquitoes swarmed, bringing malarial chills, malaise. He slipped in and out of fever. One day he woke smelling mandarins.
“Hula Man. This is becoming a habit.”
“Oogh. I found her. Then I lost her, and our child.”
“This is no place for a child.” He doled out sections of the fruit. “In the streets they’re eating rust off wheelbarrows. It is going to get very bad.”
The sweetness of the mandarin made his cheeks ache, his tongue shiver in shock. “How did you find me?”
Oogh sighed. “Don’t be sentimental. You needed to be found. Here is the news. They want you at Club Argentina, that fascistic haunt next door to ma mère’s.”
“They?”
“The usual. Axis. Spies. Ciro’s is kaput.”
“I can’t play. I’ve got to find her—”
“You must play. If not, you’ll wind up in an internment camp. Or worse.” Oogh moved closer. “Last week nine people died during surgery. Doctors here are under instructions from the Gestapo. Do you want to disappear?”
Keo sat up, suddenly alert. “I need to know what happened to my family. They live near Pearl Harbor.”
Oogh moved closer. “A shortwave in ma mère’s loo. Few casualties in Honolulu outside Pearl Harbor. Japs weren’t targeting civilians.”
He gripped Keo’s arm with amazing strength. “Come. Each day you remain in this sinkhole you’re courting death.”
They made their way down stairwells until they found an exit. On the street, six young girls were being forced into a truck. Soldiers with fixed bayonets stood on the running boards guarding them.
“Where are they taking them?” Keo asked.
“Stockades.” Oogh shook his head. “For soldiers’ pleasure.”
______
PLAYING AT CLUB ARGENTINA, HE WORE AN “A” AMERICAN armband. The Jewish drummer wore a “J” for Jew. British spies in the crowd, posing as Netherlanders, wore “H” for Holland. The city was now draped in flags of the Rising Sun and fluttering swastikas. As each day more Allied nationals were arrested, trucked to internment camps outside the city, Keo understood his freedom depended on how well he blew his horn. And tracking Sunny down depended on his being free. Life carried on, not as before, but as a parody of what it had been.
The band was housed at Hunan Mansions, near the Club, a drab hotel seething with arms dealers, black marketeers, intelligence gatherers. Weeks dragged into months as each day Keo walked the streets, searching, and each night sat on the bandstand feigning apathy. In Paris, Sunny had accused him of not thinking, not observing. Saying all he did was blow his horn. But now it was another time, another place. He saw the mindless brutality of the Japanese, and of the Nazis, masquerading as Japan’s allies while dismissing them as “little yellow monkeys.”
He watched them with their sleek heads, meticulous dress, their posture strenuously correct. Even the cars they stepped from, suave dark pods. Remembering Brême, remembering three women of the Resistance publicly hanged, Keo shook with rage. He studied his reflection in a mirror. His face was flying off its hinges.
Night after night he lay sleepless, knowing it wasn’t grief that killed a man, but impotence. He thought of their child, longing to hold her, longing for Sunny so much that he couldn’t think of touching other women, couldn’t bear to. He couldn’t even look. Sing-song girls swayed daintily before him, cheongsams slit to their thighs. High-class concubines peered from sedan chairs, pursing wet lips. White Russian whores in silver fox winked while they danced with Germans. He looked away.
The details of living began to elude him. He forgot certain rituals, bathed and shaved sporadically, stopped oiling his hair so it grew rough and kinky. It was through Sunny he had come to love his skin, his compact body. In loving him, she had extolled his dark elegance. Now he understood how beauty exists only when one exists in someone else’s eyes, how in the existence of another human, we find our human dignity.
One night the German stalked him, the Nazi with cologne and linen handkerchiefs. Pale, whippet-thin, his suit impeccable. Each time Keo blew a note, he wriggled in his chair, applauding feverishly.
The bass man whispered, “He’s got eyes for you.”
He followed Keo down the street, his dark Mercedes purring. The car pulled up alongside, the back door opened.
“Hula Man.” The voice soft, but somehow acid.
Keo climbed in so naturally it seemed congruous. They sat silent while the driver maneuvered slowly through checkpoints, bombed-out streets. The man barked through the speaking tube. The driver stopped and stepped out beside a park, leaving them alone. A hand drifted round Keo’s shoulder. Lips brushed his lips, the taste of schnapps. The other hand pried at his crotch, unzipping his pants, taking hold of his penis. The German whimpering and squirming. In one fluid motion, Keo dragged him from the car and slammed him up against the door. Mashing the German’s windpipe with his fist, he thrust his face at him.
“You Nazis are so pale. What is it, does the sun go round you?” Then he smiled, zipping up his pants. “Relax, man. I’m not going to hit you. What I hate about you isn’t physical.”
He turned and walked away, then changed his mind, retraced his steps, pulled back his fist, and smashed the German’s nose. “I lied.”
It seemed an honorable act, one of valor. As if coming to the end of a long charade. Almost languidly, he walked home through crags and spires of mortared streets. He slept deeply, dreaming of Oogh, who lectured him.
“Hula Man, you go too far. The day comes when you add one more soupçon to what’s already too much.”
At dawn, sirens whined down in front of his hotel.
Half asleep, he asked, “Am I going to prison?”
Oogh sighed. “Oh, yes.”
“Am I going to die?”
“. . . a little.”
Hearing the naked percussion of boots on stairs, he rose from his bed and dressed. They slashed his clothes from his body with bayonets, until he stood running red.
Streets glided into undifferentiated scenes of horror. Off to the west a sky of furnace colors matching his arms and legs, already beginning to fester. Squeezed against him
in a puddle of waste, a Scotsman tortured to death or unconsciousness. Packed in the back of the rumbling truck, Brits, Dutch, Americans huddled against bedrolls and suitcases, tearing their eyes from Keo’s blood-covered body to the half-dead man beside him. Japanese guards on the running boards poked at them with bayonets.
Headed to Woosung Internment Camp three hours north of Shanghai, they passed through wealthy suburbs where estates had been commandeered by Japanese troops. Empty swimming pools full of excrement and bottles, Daimlers gutted in driveways. An officer in a white kimono lying on a pillow atop a Rolls, smoking a cigar.
And farther out across a cratered wasteland, they saw platoons entrenched in what had once been villages, as defeated Chinese armies withdrew into the interior. Now hordes of homeless refugees roamed the countryside. The truck moved fast, the driver and guards pissing in bottles rather than stopping. Bandit groups of refugees had formed, ambushing trucks en route to internment camps.
The truck stopped at a water station heavily guarded by Japanese troops. Prisoners stood dumb in sunlight. Some had been held for weeks in transit camps in the city, so they were already half starved. They sipped water, then crawled toward deep grass, needing privacy. From flooded paddy fields, rotting corpses seemed to watch. Inside the truck were also camp supplies, mildewed potatoes, rice full of weevils. Bandits lying outside the guarded perimeter watched and waited.
A mile after they left the water station, Keo heard the driver curse. He crawled up on his knees, saw piles of coffins blocking the road. Across bomb-cratered fields he saw something that would haunt him all his days. Hundreds of running yellow skeletons in rags, red gaping holes instead of eyes. Starving refugees—men, children, old women—swarming toward the truck like locusts, waving tennis racquets, golf clubs, cricket bats—booty stolen from bombed-out houses near the city.
Guards shot wildly, unable to find them in their sights, some so thin bullets seemed to pass through them. The driver braked while soldiers jumped down, dragging coffins from the road. Bandits gained, climbing the back of the truck, dragging sacks of potatoes and rice past terrified prisoners. Then, ripping their clothes from them, they attacked the prisoners with golf clubs, cricket bats, beating them with the equipment of their pleasure sports.
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