The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  A little later, Hahn sailed for Hong Kong to finish the book she was writing about Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her influential sisters. She expected to return in three months. “Probably in the back of our heads was the thought, ‘The really grim things, the big bombings and battles, never come out as far as the East. We fought the war at long distance last time and we’ll fight it like that again,’ ” she writes. She never saw Shanghai again.

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  One day on Avenue Joffre, Eugenia passed a Russian restaurant named after Alexander Vertinsky, the cabaret singer she’d last seen in Ukraine. Curious, she stepped inside, and soon heard, “Zhenia! It can’t be!” Before her was the friend with whom she’d once traveled snowy streets by troika as he pursued the beautiful Valentina Sanina. After the war, Vertinsky had followed the White Russian emigration to Istanbul, where he opened the Black Rose cabaret. When the Russians started leaving Turkey, he went to Paris, before settling in Hollywood, where he reportedly had an affair with Marlene Dietrich. The Great Depression sent him abroad once again, and he had ended up in Shanghai.

  It wasn’t an entirely comfortable reunion. Eugenia had little interest in joining the White Russian laments for the lost czarist empire. Constantly propelling herself forward, she was masterful at moving on. Her refusal to look back began as a survival strategy and, as she studied yogic ideas of detachment, became a spiritual principle. She was allergic to nostalgia. Vertinsky wasn’t; he longed for Russia. Not long after their meeting, unable to bear his homesickness, he decided to return to the Soviet Union. Because Stalin was a devoted fan, Vertinsky was able to resume his celebrated career on the Russian stage.

  There was only one Russian in Shanghai with whom Eugenia became deeply close: the Jewish composer Aaron Avshalomov, a slight but handsome man with hooded, haunted eyes and wavy gray hair that swooped up from his high forehead. Born in Siberia, Avshalomov was five years older than Eugenia. Like her, he’d grown up convinced his destiny lay eastward and had led an equally itinerant life, one that, as time went on, he dreamed of joining with that of the woman he called “the Indian dancer.”

  Avshalomov fell in love with Chinese music and theater as a boy, when one of his father’s employees, a man from Shandong Province named Tung Fa, amused him by banging a gong, walking on stilts, and dressing up like a Han Dynasty warrior and performing war dances. After contracting pneumonia during a brief stint in the army during World War I, Avshalomov moved to Tientsin, a treaty port in northern China, where he found work playing the violin in a hotel. He earned enough to buy a steerage ticket to America, lived for a while in San Francisco, and married a woman named Esther. In 1917 he returned to China, dreaming of composing music that combined Western orchestration with Chinese motifs and melodies. He wrote a Chinese opera, Kuan Yin, the name of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, then returned to the United States for a couple of years. By 1929 he was back in Tientsin with his wife and young son, Jacob.

  Eventually Avshalomov moved to Shanghai, where he took a job as Shanghai municipal council librarian while he continued to pursue his music. He also took a lover, Tatiana, an earthy, saucy woman who believed herself something of a clairvoyant. Avshalomov moved in with her and her young son, Victor, while Esther and Jacob remained in Tientsin. He found increasing success with his music; in 1935 his symphonic sketch Hutungs of Peking was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by the famous Leopold Stokowski.

  When Avshalomov met Eugenia, he was in the middle of a long, drawn-out divorce from Esther, who had charged him with bigamy for his relationship with Tatiana. This didn’t dissuade him from his new infatuation. Unlike Eugenia, Avshalomov had a tendency toward self-pity and despair. “I feel old and tired, not so much in body as in spirit,” he wrote to his son in April 1939. “This waiting, always waiting for something to happen, saps my energy…It is only by force of habit that I write at all, a few bars a day, and not every day.” By May, however, his letters appeared more cheerful, and he mentioned, for the first time, “a dancer of Indian dances.”

  Avshalomov was so taken with Eugenia that he began composing Indian-themed music for her. In a July letter to his son, he wrote of “rehearsing the Indian dances with Indira Devi about whom I wrote some time ago. She is a wonderful inspiration.” The pieces were performed twice, in Jessfield Park, a popular outdoor performance venue, and then again in French Park, with the Italian maestro Mario Paci conducting. “Indira Devi danced exceptionally well, and every movement of her expressive gestures corresponded to the rhythms and phrases I conceived,” raved the besotted composer. In another letter, he tried to justify betraying Tatiana, whom everyone called Tanya, for Eugenia. “Creative work will always require new stimulus which no one woman can sustain,” he wrote.

  It’s hard to say how Eugenia saw all this, since she never mentions Avshalomov in any of her published writing. One of her students, the secretary to the U.S. military attaché, said that though Eugenia saw herself and the composer as “kindred souls,” their relationship was platonic. As Eugenia was married, it surely behooved her to give that impression, but while she probably wasn’t ever in love with Avshalomov, theirs was more than simply a devoted friendship. It’s not surprising that Tanya hated her and objected to her and Avshalomov’s collaborations. “The ballet has again twice been given up for dead,” Avshalomov lamented in 1941. “First time on account of my collaboration with Indira Devi…leading to such drama that I decided to give up on it.”

  As their small drama played out, a larger and far more serious one was going on all around them. Day by day, Shanghai life grew more unsettled as the Japanese grip on the city tightened inexorably. There was a frenetic surface jollity—“To get into a movie on a week-end without an advance booking was out of the question,” writes journalist Vanya Oakes, a friend of both Eugenia and Avshalomov. “The night clubs, overflowing with champagne, were packed.” Business and finance proceeded at their usual headlong pace. “But underneath [,] Shanghai was already suffering from a creeping, miasmic fever and there was the ominous gathering confusion of a household where someone is falling very sick indeed,” Oakes writes. Law and order broke down further. Within the once-safe International Settlement, drivers were held up at gunpoint. “Shanghai,” says Oakes, “had become a city where there might easily be a corpse on the side-walk on Saturday which would still be there on Monday.” But neither Eugenia nor Avshalomov had anyplace else to go.

  At 4:30 in the morning on December 8, 1941, Shanghailanders awoke to the sound of explosions. John Potter, an American businessman, was staying at the Shanghai Club on the Bund, and he rushed to his window. “There on the river stretch just before the club was a vivid scene of war,” he recalled, writing of the streaks of tracer bullets that “chased one another in low curves. Then came bursts of flame from the target.” That was the British warship Petrel, which Japanese boats had attacked. As it burned, billows of black smoke obscured the sky.

  At the same time, Japanese solders occupied the American gunboat Wake, arresting and imprisoning its crew and replacing the Stars and Stripes with the Rising Sun. In the city, diplomats from Allied countries were rounded up and put under house arrest at the Cathay Mansions, a luxury apartment building in the French Concession. Japanese columns poured into the international settlement. All the city’s British and American troops had left to fight the war elsewhere. Now the war had finally come to Shanghai.

  “The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy declare that a state of war exists between the Imperial Government of Japan and the Governments of Great Britain, the United States of America, and the Netherlands,” read proclamations plastered all over the International Settlement. “All people must proceed with their business as usual, and the Japanese will protect friends and enemies alike.”

  By midday, American government offices had been seized, and officials and staff were interned at the Metropole Hotel. Among them were some of Eugenia’s students and her students’ husbands. The hotel wasn’t sealed off, and dazed membe
rs of the American community gathered in the Art Deco building, crowding around radios, where reports of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor were being broadcast by shortwave from San Francisco.

  Eugenia made her way there through the afternoon drizzle. On the streets, things seemed weirdly normal. Trams and buses ran, and restaurants and department stores were open. At the hotel, finding friends and students captive and anxious, she did the only thing she could think of to help—she led them through a yoga class. “I shall never forget…the unique experience of conducting an unusual ‘prison class,’ which comprised the entire staff of the American Consulate that was kept under arrest in the Metropole Hotel,” she writes.

  Perhaps on account of her German papers, the Japanese guards let her come back in the following weeks to teach again. She had to keep her distance from the students, who gathered in a semicircle on the blue carpet of the hotel’s former dining room, “with a Japanese sentry at the door to prevent any message-carrying or private conversations.” Years later, some of these students would tell her how much yoga had helped them during the ordeals that followed.

  In the first days after the Japanese takeover, a strangely exciting sort of solidarity settled over Shanghai’s international community. One woman recalled going to the bank a few days after the occupation began—it was opened for two hours only, and was allowing people to withdraw only five hundred dollars at a time. “Stood for 1½ hours in the queue, but it was not hardship, nice and sunny, immense friendliness and community of spirit from everybody, but why does it need a catastrophe to produce a condition which ought to be as natural to humanity as breathing?” she writes. There was great hope that once the United States joined the war, it would quickly come to an end. “We could hardly foresee a war of several long years,” recalled Potter.

  But over the coming weeks and months, life in Shanghai quickly deteriorated. American, British, and Dutch businesses were seized. A proclamation ordered all citizens of Allied countries to register at the Enemy Aliens Office at Hamilton House, a commandeered apartment building in the International Settlement. Each enemy national was given a bright red armband marked with a B for British, A for American, N for the Netherlands, and X for smaller countries such as Greece. (Indians and other Asians who fell under the sovereignty of these nations were excepted.) The red armbands had to be worn in public at all times, and those sporting them were barred from theaters, cabarets, and restaurants with music.

  The Japanese froze enemy nationals’ bank accounts, allowing them to withdraw only two thousand Chinese dollars a month, forcing people used to living in colonial luxury to survive on the budget of a lower-middle-class Chinese family. Cars without Japanese plates were barred from the roads. People accustomed to chauffeured sedans took to riding bicycles. Those who could afford them started using horses and carriages; one famous Polish dressmaker attached a coachman’s seat to her glossy blue sedan.

  Inflation went wild, and because all commerce passed first through Japanese hands, staples began disappearing from shops. Once again, Eugenia was in a city where formerly comfortable people, suddenly destitute and bewildered, had to queue for hours to buy meager rations. Of course, for most Chinese people, things were far worse. Often they’d start lining up to buy rice off incoming ships the night before. “Hundreds of Chinese dead were picked up on the streets each morning, victims of hunger and exposure,” writes one resident.

  Because of their German and Czech papers, Eugenia and her husband were better situated than many of her friends. They continued to live comfortably; indeed, businessmen such as Jan Strakaty thrived because so many of their former competitors were dispossessed. For those with money, there was food to be had on the black market. Sasha continued to live with them; Russians were closely supervised but remained free. Indeed, writes one historian, “The Russian community enjoyed good amateur theater, dramatic societies, concerts, dancing schools, and ballet performances throughout the war.”

  Still, there was no escaping the pervasive terror on the streets. People of all nationalities began to disappear, some to the notorious torture chambers at Bridge House, an apartment building turned prison. (After the war, one of Eugenia’s students would tell her how much his ability to sit in lotus pose helped him when he was crowded into one of Bridge House’s packed and fetid cells.) Everyone lived in dread of an early morning visit from the Japanese gendarmerie. Eugenia was called in for questioning several times, though never detained. She tried to maintain control of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s bungalow by flying the flag of neutral Sweden, her father’s country, over it, but was eventually ordered out.

  She continued giving classes at home for a while, but soon there was hardly anyone to give classes to. As life grew harder, she and Avshalomov grew closer. To stay sane, he threw himself into work, writing up to fifteen hours a day; during the winter, he scratched out notes with freezing hands while wrapped in blankets. The Westerners left in Shanghai staged musical performances in one another’s houses.

  Then Avshalomov lost his. In 1943, in a terrifying echo of the slaughter in Europe, most of the Jews who’d arrived in Shanghai from Germany and eastern Europe were ordered into a ghetto in Hongkew, a rundown district across from the International Settlement where they were forced to crowd into squalid tenements. Avshalomov left only scattered notes from this period, but he mentions being put under house arrest on the outskirts of the city. One has to assume that Eugenia visited him there, because by the time the war was over, he trusted her more than anyone on earth.

  While conditions in the Hongkew ghetto were dire, they didn’t compare to what the Jews of Europe faced. Heinrich Himmler pressured his Japanese allies to begin exterminating the Jews, but the Japanese balked. In fact, the Japanese ended up treating the stateless Jews better than they treated the Americans, British, and Dutch, who were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

  The imprisonments began on February 1, with around four hundred young British and American men. Then another seven hundred were called. Over the next four months, all Allied citizens in Shanghai were sent to camps. They were allowed to bring as much as they could carry. “On certain days throughout January and February, anyone walking between the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral on Kiangse Road and the tenders on the Bund just before the Soochow Creek would witness the astonishing sight of several hundred white men, women, and children bent under luggage and bedding like proverbial beasts of burden as they made their way from the cathedral toward the boats that would take them to their new homes,” writes author Stella Dong.

  Some industrious camp inmates organized makeshift universities to keep themselves productive. At Pootung Camp, one could study languages, mathematics, zoology, psychology—and yoga. The last was almost certainly taught by one of Eugenia’s students. She would later hear about several such concentration camp yoga classes.

  Outside the camps, life was easier but not easy. Ordinary Chinese families were reduced to begging in the garbage-strewn streets. Imperious Japanese soldiers kept the population under tight control and could commandeer property at any moment. Time and again, they’d search Eugenia and Jo’s house without any pretext. Eventually, when a Japanese general cast his eye on their home, she, Jan, and Sasha were forced to move, although Eugenia, characteristically bold, refused to leave until the Japanese found them another minimally acceptable place to live. They were fortunate that Jan owned a noodle factory, because many shops had bare shelves.

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  By the fall of 1944, American air raids had begun. The sight of silver bombers and fighter planes thrilled many desperate onlookers—“it was almost like a fairy tale over Shanghai,” said one Russian resident. Still, the bombs and the constant screaming of air-raid sirens were terrifying. The Japanese ordered residents to dig trenches in the streets and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew. News was heavily censored, so at night, people huddled around contraband radios, frantic for word of Allied progress. Eugenia thought they were doomed “to be either level-bombed or blow
n up by the Japanese, who had decided to turn Shanghai into ashes should they lose the battle for it.”

  She would later write that yoga gave her serenity and equanimity during these years. Still, she thought a lot about death. She began to frequent a Buddhist temple and befriended a young monk there. One day, she told Jan that should she be killed, she wanted a Buddhist cremation rather than a Christian burial. As usual, he scoffed, telling her that, by law, she had to be buried according to the rites of her legal religion. She wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, but just in case, she went to the temple and officially converted to Buddhism, received a document, and gave it to her husband. She never really identified as a Buddhist, but like her yoga practice, which she maintained throughout the bombing, her conversion gave her some sense of control over her own future, ensuring, at the very least, that she’d never be trapped in a coffin.

  In the spring of 1945, secret shortwave radios brought news of Hitler’s suicide and the Allied victory in Europe. The war in the Pacific dragged on, but the sight of ever more Allied planes in the skies over Shanghai heartened residents. Finally, on August 16, 1945, ten days after an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima, Shanghai learned that the war was over. All over the city, radios and loudspeakers played a recording of the capitulation speech that Japanese emperor Hirohito had delivered the day before. Speaking of the “new and most cruel bomb,” deployed by the Americans, he said, “[s]hould we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”