By Adria Lang
I have never been to China, and though I have been to Berlin, it wasn't until after I had finished writing the first draft of this novel, in essence what you see here before you. For what, I have no doubt, would be a complicated series of legal reasons, I cannot ever publish this book. It is not my story. It is the intellectual property (in outline) of a former client. We broke before the book could be finished and the contract was never fulfilled, thus, I am left with a years worth of work, some of which I always thought held great promise, balancing the shaky legs of my desk. Today I decided to post it for posterity and for my own sanity. All the words are mine. With the exception of the lovers, their parents, and the immediate family, all the characters are mine. The title has been changed, but other then that, the book is exactly what it was when I wrote it, unedited and uncut. That being said I apologize in advance for any spelling mistakes, grammatical blunders, historical inaccuracies, or blatant bastardizations of anyone's religion or culture. It is a romantic novel, set to a romantic score -- each chapter heading is a accompanied by a different piece of music by a composer from the Romantic Era -- it was written in the spirit of its prose. I had hoped a second draft, and a well researched editor, would help me iron out the mistakes I made, though, that being said, I strove for authenticity as much as was possible within the bounds of reason at the time. I am posting this on my blog on November 9th, 2009, the twenty year anniversary of the fall of The Berlin Wall. I would never claim to have done this on purpose, but it did inspire a kind of reflection on my part, but don't worry, I will keep it to myself. Thanks so much for linking over to the home of my little lost novel. I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget to subscribe. And as I said, it is written in pretty heavy prose, so chapters tend to stand on their own. If you don't feel like reading a whole book on line, skip about, technology makes this easier than turning a page.
谢谢,
Adria Lang
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Ouverture
a novel
Prelude...
It began with a rondo capriccioso and an ever-increasing preoccupation with perspective. He had heard the story a thousand times, from when he was a small child, and he knew the melodies as well as he knew his own name, an odd name, unmusical and percussive; Igor Chang.
As a child he had hated it. He was only one-quarter German. So somehow it hadn’t seemed fair that fifty-percent of his name call to mind Doctor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant. In truth he was named after Stravinsky, well, Stravinsky, and what would have been his great uncle, had he not been murdered, but try telling that to the kids on the playground.
It wasn’t until he grew older and enrolled in Juilliard (one of the few places in the world where being named after Stravinsky is terribly cool), that the name grew on him, as did his course curly hair and light eyes, not blue like his mother’s, but not black either. The girls liked them too--the pretty ones with the shoulder length hair, pencil skirts, and stickered instrument cases--that and his height, but there was more to it. His looks were part of his legacy and his legacy is what brought him out that rainy afternoon.
Did he need a ride? His father wanted to know.
“And your passport? You have your passport, right, Iggy?” His mother, who was not overly affectionate couldn’t stop touching his face.
“I’m fine, you guys.”
He was fine. He was at the beginning of a journey, a quest even, and he wanted to begin it alone, so he kissed his parents goodbye and left home, alone, for the first time.
When Igor was born his mother Shasha put her career on hold, not a new story, but it carries a bit more weight when that career happens to be world-class violinist. She stopped touring and focused her efforts on raising her son and recording. When she was in the studio, and his father-- a conductor who hadn’t stopped touring--was out of town, Igor would be left with his grandfather who everyone, including his mother, referred to as Maestro.
The whole family lived on the top two floors of a converted townhouse on 110th Street and Riverside Drive. Maestro, who lived upstairs, never slept, or at least Igor suspected that he didn’t. His earliest memories were of lying in his bed and hearing Maestro pacing softly from the kitchen to the living room and back again. He pictured him with a cup of tea between both hands, it was how he warmed them for playing, which is what he would do after the pacing.
He would play every evening, and Igor fell asleep to it every night. When he got older and followed the family tradition into music, namely the violin, he would joke with his mother that he had been subliminally conditioned, brainwashed even, to the instrument, and any other talent that may have been lying dormant within him never had a chance with Maestro playing away into the wee hours of the morning.
When Igor woke, he could still hear the music, as if it had never stopped. At breakfast he would wolf down his Apple Jacks and paddle up the steep stairs on all fours to Maestro’s flat. There he would be, as predictable as winter, in the corner by the window, ankle high in sheet music, wearing a cheongsam, his nimble fingers working the neck of the “Lion,” his priceless Stainer violin with the lion carved into the head.
Maestro had a shock of white hair and a long pointed beard. He spoke broken Mandarin to Igor who picked up his accent, a byproduct of the time they spent together that Shasha found endearing. She would show him off at family parties, “My son speaks Mandarin with a German accent, just like Maestro!” Then the boy would blush and Maestro would put his hand on his shoulder and pat it in silent solidarity.
They shared a bond, one that was particularly special to Maestro since he had never known the joys of fatherhood. He spoiled Igor in his quiet way. He taught him too, but the violin didn’t come first, not this time around. Walks along the river, trips to the zoo, it was getting to know his grandson that was important. “The music will still be here when we get back,” was his response to Igor when he knew he should be practicing and Maestro suggested a trip to the Natural History Museum.
Sometimes they didn’t get back from their excursions till late and Shasha would be worried. She would reprimand her father for spoiling Igor, to which Maestro would reply, “Relax, Shashala, it’s in his genes.”
It certainly was. Igor had what they all had, late night brainwashing sessions aside. And once Maestro was too old to instruct the boy full time, he was sent to Juilliard, his mother’s almer mata. He was a shoe in, as the son of Shasha Streng.
Everyone knew the story. How she had been her own father’s apprentice, how neither of them knew, since her mother had kept her birth a secret for fear of persecution during the Cultural revolution in China. It was a fantastical story. Those who questioned further would hear about Joshua Streng, a German born Jew who escaped the Nazi’s to Shanghai, where he met Igor’s grandmother. How he lost her, was imprisoned in Taiwan, and found her again only to leave and regret it. Igor had the stories committed to memory, because people would ask. People who had been to the concert at Carnegie Hall where Shasha played one of Maestro’s compositions on his first trip out of China in twenty years. He would tell people about the wedding of his grandparents, how it didn’t happen till they were in their seventies.
He had heard the stories thousands of times, in broad brushstrokes, from his mother, from friends, teachers and historians, the media even; the only one who didn’t ever discuss it was Maestro himself.
When Igor was thirteen and consumed with a growing desire for his grandfather’s perspective, he would badger Maestro to tell him, but he would only make silly excuses, “I don’t remember,” being the starring one.
“You don’t remember? You remember every movement of that Sibelius concerto,” or whatever he was playing at the time, “but you don’t remember any stories about China?” Then Maestro would shrug and change the subject.
For years he held tight to this stance and it wasn’t till a year before his death that he opened up to Igor. It was after the boy’s first public recital, one in which he played a very familiar tune, a melody that brought Maestro back to a smoky little bar in Shanghai. He sat and listened, eyes closed, as was his way, until his daughter touched his arm.
“Look, Maestro, isn’t that familiar?”
Igor, behind a tangle of dark hair, played a rondo capriccioso by Saint-Saëns that Maestro knew in his sleep. Everything about it was familiar, down to the flaxen-haired pianist backing him up--it brought the old man to tears. He decided Igor needed to know his story. He knew his daughter had set him up, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have a lot of time left, so the very next day he called Igor up to his flat and over a cup of tea to warm their hands, began a narrative that would span three months.
Years later, when Igor was nineteen, he set out to backpack through China and gain some perspective of his own. It was raining the day he left, and he couldn’t contain his excitement. He felt free, on the brink of adventure, he felt the way Maestro must have felt on so many occasions. He was a man now, too. An adventurer--
“Iggy, wait!”
Igor rolled his eyes as his mother chased him down the street towards Broadway. She was ruining his exit--just a little. Then he registered what was in her hand.
“Take it. Be careful with it.”
“Mom, I can’t. What if…?”
“It belongs in China, you need to play it in China. Play it for them both.”
He took the Lion, kissed his mother for the fifth time, and tripped over puddles towards the 1/9 Train heading south.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Chapter 27
Finale.
Dearest Max,
I don’t blame you if you are cross with me but I hope you will take the time to read this letter as I risked my life getting it out of the country. I offer that as an amusing incentive. If it does not suffice, I have taken the liberty of ruling the backs of these pages for you to compose on, also not an easy task if you consider my means, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I hope my letter and or scrap paper finds you well.
First off, I suppose I owe you and apology regarding my abrupt escape from New York and what must have seemed like an impulsive move, a hasty sloughing off of my western calluses in favor of eastern bunions. But the longer I stayed the more I felt pushed towards some sort of invisible edge that my old bones had no interest in testing. The new west is for the young, people like you. It was too much for me. I can admit that now from the oppressive comfort of new China. That, and I missed the mist.
If you were to see me in my current surroundings, now, as I write this letter, you, my dear XinSi, would recoil in horror. Either that or you would laugh. I can picture it, your reaction to the dirt floor, the stonewalls and the leaky bamboo roof. You would assume a very serious tone and gently question my sanity regarding the hay cot, the fishing equipment, and my peasant’s attire. You would assume I had gone mad, but before long I would convince you of exactly the opposite, for never in all my life have I been more content.
Here on the ocean one has no choice but to fully embrace contentedness. The Pacific is the great cleanser, and the sky is the infinite starry map that forces us to look at life from her harsh perspective. You recall my obsession with radiuses? Here my radius is the smallest it has ever been. For the first time I can see its edge from wherever I stand, how it juts out into the surf. If it were possible to walk its perimeter, twice a day it would drown me. I belong to no one but the tide.
But my Max, I can feel you turning the paper over so I will stop rambling and get on with it. I live on the outskirts of a small village of stone whose name does not matter. It was the last place she was seen which is why I came and when the lead went cold, when I had exhausted every last option, every last chance of finding her, I decided to stay on till I mustered the nerve to arrange for myself a tidy exit from the human race. Luckily, I remain the coward I have always been and while mustering in vain, stumbled, in the oddest way, on the most glaringly obvious reason to live.
In Stone Village I am inconspicuous. As a westerner I am the enemy, but for some reason they seem to tolerate me, at least for now. I suppose every village needs an idiot, every bridge, a troll. I am the shaman of the old religion passing out my elixirs and talismans to the surfs ignored by the converted blue bloods that secretly fear a peasant revolt. What are they, you ask? What are my talismans? What does the old man by the sea supply like a drug to the rebellious few? It’s so shocking I doubt you will believe me. It’s G clefs, rests, sharps and flats. Notes. Musik ist hier verboten.
It’s all forbidden. They have outlawed western music. Can you even begin to imagine it? Oh Max, how you must be cringing at all this. I know what you think of me. I’m not stupid. I must thrive on misery, mustn’t I, like a professional martyr? Joshua Streng in a world where music is punishable by death--masochism perfected, despair achieved.
“Congratulations,” you would say, “for stumbling on such an efficient method of self-punishment. Maybe now the ghosts will retreat, maybe now the universe will be appeased.”
And in a way, Max, you would be right. I took a cue from the monks and the Buddhists, even the Communists--clear your mind, negate all feeling, separate. Commit suicide of the ego. It was wonderful. Just me and the sea--till one day a visitor came knocking at my hovel.
I was shaken, physically by the sound. It had been some months since I had been in contact with other people--fish sure, but people--knowing they were near by and music-less was good enough for me. I didn’t need them. So when I saw the woman and the girl, I was dazed.
The woman was persistent, talkative and loud. I wondered if her shrillness was the side effect of a life without music and didn’t care. I’ve always been selfish in regard to the concerns of others (the sea told me that.) She knew me, she said. From Harbin. I was friendly with the music teacher, Miss Bai. So was she. Of course I questioned her, but turned up nothing.
“LanLan vanished into thin air soon after you left,” she told me, which was the same story I got from everyone in Harbin. Chen was no help in Shanghai. Her family knew nothing in Hong Kong. BaiLan is gone and gone and gone. And here was this woman with a strange looking child reminding me of it. Annoyed, I asked her to leave but not before she could make her intended request.
“I want you to teach my daughter music,” she said.
By this point the girl had circled my mud hut hacienda three times and found The Lion propped in a corner holding up a wall or two. And Max, I’ll be darned if I didn’t see the most delectable opportunity in this. An alternative to my monk like existence (which in all honesty had been growing somewhat intolerable) had reared her little head, a child, who to my surprise is quite the prodigy. Sha-Sha composes, and has inspired me to start writing again. We scribble in the margins of the Communist newsletter then line the hut with them. We write Symphonies in sand and watch as the tide washes them away.
She plays The Lion like you did, with a hunger to fill the void inside her head that she can’t yet understand. She is filled with wonder.
I will write again, Max. I am taking on two more secret students in my new role of note smuggler, cultural counter-revolutionary, Liszt liberator, Beethoven bolsterer, supporter of Schubert... Till then, be well, mein sohn.
Alle meine Liebe,
JS
Igor read the letter four times while on the subway back up town. He had one more stop before taking the A Train to the airport, one final destination that would bring him that much closer to his past, Seventh-avenue and Fifty-seventh Street.
When he was a boy, Maestro would take him on outings around the city. Museums, the zoo, parks, they were very adventurous in those days, but if it had to be said that there was one place above all others that was theirs, it was without a doubt beneath the tan brick arches, flags and deco-marquee of Carnegie Hall. It was their temple and Joshua had instilled it with so much holiness that a young Igor cried out for weekly pilgrimages.
He would run up to the doors and try them gaining access to the golden lobby where they would sit on the stairs, or sometimes in the Weill Recital Hall if it was free.
“They named this room after a very old friend of mine,” Joshua would tell his wide-eyed grandson.
“Tell me the story of Mom and Grandma,” he would demand and every time Joshua would comply, telling the story as if for the first time.
“It all started far, far away in the north of China when your mother was a pretty little girl,” he began. Igor knew the story so well his lips would silently move with Joshua’s as if he were singing along to a familiar song.
“In those day’s China was not a very nice place to live, especially if you like music as much as we do. The leader of the country had made music illegal so anyone caught playing it would get his head chopped off.”
“Why?” Like a well-rehearsed actor, Igor knew all his cues.
“Because that was the law. Now, your grandfather lived in a tiny house by the sea. If I got hungry I would pluck a fish or two from the ocean to eat, and at night, I would play my violin to the moon and think about your grandmother.”
“Where was she?”
“Well, that was the funny part, I didn’t know where she was. I had lost her and after searching far and wide, I decided to wait and hope that she would find me. It is easier to be found if you stay in one place, right?”
“Right. And she did find you, she--”
“Slow down. Your grandmother was a very smart and very beautiful woman, much smarter than me. She knew where I was all the time and had been watching me from a far. She also knew something I didn’t know. Years earlier, before they made music illegal, when we were together and happy, we made baby. Do you know who the baby was?”
“Mom!”
“Your mother, yes. The baby grew inside your grandmother for nine months but by that time your dumkopff grandfather was long gone.”
“Where were you?”
“I was here in New York living with your uncle Max.”
“And Barry?”
“No, this was before Barry.”
“Oh.”
“But Igor, we’re getting off the subject.” Igor liked getting off the subject. Every detail, every question made the story last longer.
“Where was I? Okay. Life was very hard in China for your grandmother. People were forced to work all the time. She couldn’t tell anyone she was going to have a baby because if she did, the police would come and take it away and make it work too. So she hid the baby while it was in her belly, and when it was born…”
“When she was born.”
“Yes, she, your mother was born she gave the baby to a family who could take care of her. But she never stopped watching. Six years later, when she heard that I had come back from America she watched me, too. And then your grandmother came up with the most wonderful idea.”
“I know what it is.”
“So you don’t want to hear the rest?”
“No! I do.”
“Okay then, be quiet. The most important thing in your grandmother’s life, aside from your mother, was music. But as you know, she couldn’t play for fear that she would lose her head. The police in the town where she lived knew that she had been a musician before music was outlawed so they watched her very carefully, just waiting for her to do something wrong so that they could lop her head right off. But your grandmother was too smart for them. She didn’t give them a chance. Instead she pretended to hate music as much as they did in the daytime, and at night she would hum into her pillow and let her mind drift off to concert halls and parlors like this one, filled with chamber music, and symphonies.
The problem was, it made her very mad to know that her daughter was growing up without knowing what she knew. Think Igor, what kind of person would you be today if you had never known music? What would you do if you weren’t allowed to play your violin?”
“Play basketball, probably.”
“You’re too short. Anyway, it was thoughts like this that consumed your mother, so she went to the family who had adopted Sha-Sha and told them of her predicament. YongLi, your mother’s guardian was sympathetic, but didn’t know what could be done about it without getting all of their heads cut off.”
“This is where you came into the picture.”
“This is where I came into the picture. Your very clever grandmother knew that I had been looking for her. She also knew that if I found her it would put both of our lives in danger, so she stayed hidden from me. I had searched all of China for that woman, and for ten years she was less than a mile away. Women are much smarter than men, Igor. Know this now. Your grandmother came up with a brilliant plan. She had YongLi bring Sha-Sha to me and demand that I teach her to play the violin.
Your mother was a magical child. Her eyes were almost violet which made me think there was something wrong with them at first; see how stupid I was? Your Uncle Max would say that I was always too consumed with myself to notice anything, and maybe he was right, but even with her talent and her eyes, and the way her hair fell, not pin straight, but in waves, there was no part of me that ever suspected that she was mine.
I taught her to play in secret. Just the two of us and the ocean. Not to mention Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, and Beethoven. There were other students, parents who like your grandmother longed for the old ways, who wanted their children to know the beauty of music, but they all fell away eventually. When you open a soul it’s not so easy to close it. Sometimes it’s safer not to open it at all. That was the plan of the communists, close every soul, by force if necessary, and in time hope people forget.
But Sha-Sha’s soul was as wide as the horizon. I have never known a child so eager to play music; it was like a sugar addiction. She would run to my cottage and slam the door in grabbing The Lion and launching into the most complicated of pieces. It was ear-bleedingly awful for a long time but with practice she soon became great. By the time she was in her teens, I was looking into ways of getting her out of China. She had a talent so unique, it would have been a crime to deprive the world of it.
I had almost figured out a way to get her to Taiwan and from there, to Japan, when YongLi came to see me. She said that she was happy I thought so highly of Sha-Sha’s talents but that there were certain things I didn’t know, things that prevented her from giving Sha-Sha permission to escape the country. I was livid, fuming like a smoking chimney at the poor woman who just sat there looking at me. When I was finished she handed me a small piece of paper with an address written on it.
‘Go tomorrow, she wants to see you.’”
“Grandma?”
“You always ruin the story, Igor. Yes, your grandmother. My love. She wanted to see me. Now, by this point your dumkopff grandpa had figured it all out so, I put on my best clothes, picked a bunch of wild flowers from among the weeds, and walked the mile that had separated us for twelve years.”
“Did you kiss?”
“Not at first. We embraced, we talked for hours—there was much to be talked about. Secret things from the past, but mostly about Sha-Sha, she was nineteen by then, our daughter was nineteen.”
“When does she play at Carnegie Hall?”
“I thought you wanted me to stretch out the story, now you want me to skip?”
“It’s my favorite part.”
It was his favorite part. It was the reason he wanted to stop in and see it before leaving. He wanted to picture himself there on the night his mother played Carnegie Hall. Igor pushed the door open and entered the familiar lobby. It looked smaller than he had remembered, but that’s the way with childhood, the world shrinks, as you get older, the ceilings lower, the sparkle fades. But he remembered the smell and was transported. After explaining who he was to the guard--the name Sha-Sha Streng opened many doors--he was granted access to Weill Hall.
“At least it wasn’t Brecht,” he whispered, and after bidding the ghosts farewell he entered the magnificence of Carnegie Hall herself. Igor felt like a pious man come to pray. And when he looked over, saw that his grandfather was already there in a tuxedo with his head bowed and his eyes closed, his preferred listening stance. Beside him in the front row sat BaiLan Streng, his wife, adorned in royal blue, clutching his hand, and on stage playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saens, was their violet-eyed daughter Sha-Sha.
“Look at her,” BaiLan whispered to her husband. But he had gone off into the music.
“You fell in love with me to this piece in a smoky Shanghai Club,” he said to her.
“Shh. Look.”
They watched, rapt, Igor, Joshua, BaiLan, and a full house of friends, extended family and music lovers as she played the piece accompanied by the Philharmonic Orchestra.
Igor wished he could have been there when she brought him up to conduct one of his own compositions, a concerto written in colors that told the story of his life.
“Mein Vater, der Stolz von Berlin, Joshua Streng,” she told an emotional crowd, “Er überlebte die Nazi's.” He survived the Nazi’s. “Er überlebte die Kulturrevolution.” He survived the Cultural Revolution. “Er ist mein Held, und er ist hier zu spielen für Sie heute abend.” He is my hero, and he is here to conduct for you tonight…
If it is possible to be the master of one’s destiny and choose the center point of one’s own radius, the point of perspective from which you see the world, then Igor picked the spot upon which he stood, a tape mark put in the middle of the Carnegie stage for the soloist. His mother had seen the world from here and so had his grandfather. He thought of their journeys as he gazed into the heavens above the orchestra, the plight of his family and how in many ways, even unintentionally, they led here, to this, the most sacred of musical temples, a place where art, creativity, and freedom are worshipped. It was from here, he decided, that his journey would begin.
Igor looked up and saw the same security guard from earlier walking down the isle catching him on the stage.
“Sorry, I’m just leaving,” but the man didn’t reprimand him. Instead he picked up his violin case.
“Sha-Sha Streng’s son, huh? So, I guess you know how to play this thing?”
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Hey, I tell you what, my boss is on lunch, why don’t you give it a whirl?” The guard offered the case to Igor, but he just smiled.
“That’s okay,” he said hopping off the stage, “I’ve got a plane to catch, but I’ll be back someday soon.”
And with that, he collected his things and set out to explore his world.
The End.
Dearest Max,
I don’t blame you if you are cross with me but I hope you will take the time to read this letter as I risked my life getting it out of the country. I offer that as an amusing incentive. If it does not suffice, I have taken the liberty of ruling the backs of these pages for you to compose on, also not an easy task if you consider my means, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I hope my letter and or scrap paper finds you well.
First off, I suppose I owe you and apology regarding my abrupt escape from New York and what must have seemed like an impulsive move, a hasty sloughing off of my western calluses in favor of eastern bunions. But the longer I stayed the more I felt pushed towards some sort of invisible edge that my old bones had no interest in testing. The new west is for the young, people like you. It was too much for me. I can admit that now from the oppressive comfort of new China. That, and I missed the mist.
If you were to see me in my current surroundings, now, as I write this letter, you, my dear XinSi, would recoil in horror. Either that or you would laugh. I can picture it, your reaction to the dirt floor, the stonewalls and the leaky bamboo roof. You would assume a very serious tone and gently question my sanity regarding the hay cot, the fishing equipment, and my peasant’s attire. You would assume I had gone mad, but before long I would convince you of exactly the opposite, for never in all my life have I been more content.
Here on the ocean one has no choice but to fully embrace contentedness. The Pacific is the great cleanser, and the sky is the infinite starry map that forces us to look at life from her harsh perspective. You recall my obsession with radiuses? Here my radius is the smallest it has ever been. For the first time I can see its edge from wherever I stand, how it juts out into the surf. If it were possible to walk its perimeter, twice a day it would drown me. I belong to no one but the tide.
But my Max, I can feel you turning the paper over so I will stop rambling and get on with it. I live on the outskirts of a small village of stone whose name does not matter. It was the last place she was seen which is why I came and when the lead went cold, when I had exhausted every last option, every last chance of finding her, I decided to stay on till I mustered the nerve to arrange for myself a tidy exit from the human race. Luckily, I remain the coward I have always been and while mustering in vain, stumbled, in the oddest way, on the most glaringly obvious reason to live.
In Stone Village I am inconspicuous. As a westerner I am the enemy, but for some reason they seem to tolerate me, at least for now. I suppose every village needs an idiot, every bridge, a troll. I am the shaman of the old religion passing out my elixirs and talismans to the surfs ignored by the converted blue bloods that secretly fear a peasant revolt. What are they, you ask? What are my talismans? What does the old man by the sea supply like a drug to the rebellious few? It’s so shocking I doubt you will believe me. It’s G clefs, rests, sharps and flats. Notes. Musik ist hier verboten.
It’s all forbidden. They have outlawed western music. Can you even begin to imagine it? Oh Max, how you must be cringing at all this. I know what you think of me. I’m not stupid. I must thrive on misery, mustn’t I, like a professional martyr? Joshua Streng in a world where music is punishable by death--masochism perfected, despair achieved.
“Congratulations,” you would say, “for stumbling on such an efficient method of self-punishment. Maybe now the ghosts will retreat, maybe now the universe will be appeased.”
And in a way, Max, you would be right. I took a cue from the monks and the Buddhists, even the Communists--clear your mind, negate all feeling, separate. Commit suicide of the ego. It was wonderful. Just me and the sea--till one day a visitor came knocking at my hovel.
I was shaken, physically by the sound. It had been some months since I had been in contact with other people--fish sure, but people--knowing they were near by and music-less was good enough for me. I didn’t need them. So when I saw the woman and the girl, I was dazed.
The woman was persistent, talkative and loud. I wondered if her shrillness was the side effect of a life without music and didn’t care. I’ve always been selfish in regard to the concerns of others (the sea told me that.) She knew me, she said. From Harbin. I was friendly with the music teacher, Miss Bai. So was she. Of course I questioned her, but turned up nothing.
“LanLan vanished into thin air soon after you left,” she told me, which was the same story I got from everyone in Harbin. Chen was no help in Shanghai. Her family knew nothing in Hong Kong. BaiLan is gone and gone and gone. And here was this woman with a strange looking child reminding me of it. Annoyed, I asked her to leave but not before she could make her intended request.
“I want you to teach my daughter music,” she said.
By this point the girl had circled my mud hut hacienda three times and found The Lion propped in a corner holding up a wall or two. And Max, I’ll be darned if I didn’t see the most delectable opportunity in this. An alternative to my monk like existence (which in all honesty had been growing somewhat intolerable) had reared her little head, a child, who to my surprise is quite the prodigy. Sha-Sha composes, and has inspired me to start writing again. We scribble in the margins of the Communist newsletter then line the hut with them. We write Symphonies in sand and watch as the tide washes them away.
She plays The Lion like you did, with a hunger to fill the void inside her head that she can’t yet understand. She is filled with wonder.
I will write again, Max. I am taking on two more secret students in my new role of note smuggler, cultural counter-revolutionary, Liszt liberator, Beethoven bolsterer, supporter of Schubert... Till then, be well, mein sohn.
Alle meine Liebe,
JS
Igor read the letter four times while on the subway back up town. He had one more stop before taking the A Train to the airport, one final destination that would bring him that much closer to his past, Seventh-avenue and Fifty-seventh Street.
When he was a boy, Maestro would take him on outings around the city. Museums, the zoo, parks, they were very adventurous in those days, but if it had to be said that there was one place above all others that was theirs, it was without a doubt beneath the tan brick arches, flags and deco-marquee of Carnegie Hall. It was their temple and Joshua had instilled it with so much holiness that a young Igor cried out for weekly pilgrimages.
He would run up to the doors and try them gaining access to the golden lobby where they would sit on the stairs, or sometimes in the Weill Recital Hall if it was free.
“They named this room after a very old friend of mine,” Joshua would tell his wide-eyed grandson.
“Tell me the story of Mom and Grandma,” he would demand and every time Joshua would comply, telling the story as if for the first time.
“It all started far, far away in the north of China when your mother was a pretty little girl,” he began. Igor knew the story so well his lips would silently move with Joshua’s as if he were singing along to a familiar song.
“In those day’s China was not a very nice place to live, especially if you like music as much as we do. The leader of the country had made music illegal so anyone caught playing it would get his head chopped off.”
“Why?” Like a well-rehearsed actor, Igor knew all his cues.
“Because that was the law. Now, your grandfather lived in a tiny house by the sea. If I got hungry I would pluck a fish or two from the ocean to eat, and at night, I would play my violin to the moon and think about your grandmother.”
“Where was she?”
“Well, that was the funny part, I didn’t know where she was. I had lost her and after searching far and wide, I decided to wait and hope that she would find me. It is easier to be found if you stay in one place, right?”
“Right. And she did find you, she--”
“Slow down. Your grandmother was a very smart and very beautiful woman, much smarter than me. She knew where I was all the time and had been watching me from a far. She also knew something I didn’t know. Years earlier, before they made music illegal, when we were together and happy, we made baby. Do you know who the baby was?”
“Mom!”
“Your mother, yes. The baby grew inside your grandmother for nine months but by that time your dumkopff grandfather was long gone.”
“Where were you?”
“I was here in New York living with your uncle Max.”
“And Barry?”
“No, this was before Barry.”
“Oh.”
“But Igor, we’re getting off the subject.” Igor liked getting off the subject. Every detail, every question made the story last longer.
“Where was I? Okay. Life was very hard in China for your grandmother. People were forced to work all the time. She couldn’t tell anyone she was going to have a baby because if she did, the police would come and take it away and make it work too. So she hid the baby while it was in her belly, and when it was born…”
“When she was born.”
“Yes, she, your mother was born she gave the baby to a family who could take care of her. But she never stopped watching. Six years later, when she heard that I had come back from America she watched me, too. And then your grandmother came up with the most wonderful idea.”
“I know what it is.”
“So you don’t want to hear the rest?”
“No! I do.”
“Okay then, be quiet. The most important thing in your grandmother’s life, aside from your mother, was music. But as you know, she couldn’t play for fear that she would lose her head. The police in the town where she lived knew that she had been a musician before music was outlawed so they watched her very carefully, just waiting for her to do something wrong so that they could lop her head right off. But your grandmother was too smart for them. She didn’t give them a chance. Instead she pretended to hate music as much as they did in the daytime, and at night she would hum into her pillow and let her mind drift off to concert halls and parlors like this one, filled with chamber music, and symphonies.
The problem was, it made her very mad to know that her daughter was growing up without knowing what she knew. Think Igor, what kind of person would you be today if you had never known music? What would you do if you weren’t allowed to play your violin?”
“Play basketball, probably.”
“You’re too short. Anyway, it was thoughts like this that consumed your mother, so she went to the family who had adopted Sha-Sha and told them of her predicament. YongLi, your mother’s guardian was sympathetic, but didn’t know what could be done about it without getting all of their heads cut off.”
“This is where you came into the picture.”
“This is where I came into the picture. Your very clever grandmother knew that I had been looking for her. She also knew that if I found her it would put both of our lives in danger, so she stayed hidden from me. I had searched all of China for that woman, and for ten years she was less than a mile away. Women are much smarter than men, Igor. Know this now. Your grandmother came up with a brilliant plan. She had YongLi bring Sha-Sha to me and demand that I teach her to play the violin.
Your mother was a magical child. Her eyes were almost violet which made me think there was something wrong with them at first; see how stupid I was? Your Uncle Max would say that I was always too consumed with myself to notice anything, and maybe he was right, but even with her talent and her eyes, and the way her hair fell, not pin straight, but in waves, there was no part of me that ever suspected that she was mine.
I taught her to play in secret. Just the two of us and the ocean. Not to mention Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, and Beethoven. There were other students, parents who like your grandmother longed for the old ways, who wanted their children to know the beauty of music, but they all fell away eventually. When you open a soul it’s not so easy to close it. Sometimes it’s safer not to open it at all. That was the plan of the communists, close every soul, by force if necessary, and in time hope people forget.
But Sha-Sha’s soul was as wide as the horizon. I have never known a child so eager to play music; it was like a sugar addiction. She would run to my cottage and slam the door in grabbing The Lion and launching into the most complicated of pieces. It was ear-bleedingly awful for a long time but with practice she soon became great. By the time she was in her teens, I was looking into ways of getting her out of China. She had a talent so unique, it would have been a crime to deprive the world of it.
I had almost figured out a way to get her to Taiwan and from there, to Japan, when YongLi came to see me. She said that she was happy I thought so highly of Sha-Sha’s talents but that there were certain things I didn’t know, things that prevented her from giving Sha-Sha permission to escape the country. I was livid, fuming like a smoking chimney at the poor woman who just sat there looking at me. When I was finished she handed me a small piece of paper with an address written on it.
‘Go tomorrow, she wants to see you.’”
“Grandma?”
“You always ruin the story, Igor. Yes, your grandmother. My love. She wanted to see me. Now, by this point your dumkopff grandpa had figured it all out so, I put on my best clothes, picked a bunch of wild flowers from among the weeds, and walked the mile that had separated us for twelve years.”
“Did you kiss?”
“Not at first. We embraced, we talked for hours—there was much to be talked about. Secret things from the past, but mostly about Sha-Sha, she was nineteen by then, our daughter was nineteen.”
“When does she play at Carnegie Hall?”
“I thought you wanted me to stretch out the story, now you want me to skip?”
“It’s my favorite part.”
It was his favorite part. It was the reason he wanted to stop in and see it before leaving. He wanted to picture himself there on the night his mother played Carnegie Hall. Igor pushed the door open and entered the familiar lobby. It looked smaller than he had remembered, but that’s the way with childhood, the world shrinks, as you get older, the ceilings lower, the sparkle fades. But he remembered the smell and was transported. After explaining who he was to the guard--the name Sha-Sha Streng opened many doors--he was granted access to Weill Hall.
“At least it wasn’t Brecht,” he whispered, and after bidding the ghosts farewell he entered the magnificence of Carnegie Hall herself. Igor felt like a pious man come to pray. And when he looked over, saw that his grandfather was already there in a tuxedo with his head bowed and his eyes closed, his preferred listening stance. Beside him in the front row sat BaiLan Streng, his wife, adorned in royal blue, clutching his hand, and on stage playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saens, was their violet-eyed daughter Sha-Sha.
“Look at her,” BaiLan whispered to her husband. But he had gone off into the music.
“You fell in love with me to this piece in a smoky Shanghai Club,” he said to her.
“Shh. Look.”
They watched, rapt, Igor, Joshua, BaiLan, and a full house of friends, extended family and music lovers as she played the piece accompanied by the Philharmonic Orchestra.
Igor wished he could have been there when she brought him up to conduct one of his own compositions, a concerto written in colors that told the story of his life.
“Mein Vater, der Stolz von Berlin, Joshua Streng,” she told an emotional crowd, “Er überlebte die Nazi's.” He survived the Nazi’s. “Er überlebte die Kulturrevolution.” He survived the Cultural Revolution. “Er ist mein Held, und er ist hier zu spielen für Sie heute abend.” He is my hero, and he is here to conduct for you tonight…
If it is possible to be the master of one’s destiny and choose the center point of one’s own radius, the point of perspective from which you see the world, then Igor picked the spot upon which he stood, a tape mark put in the middle of the Carnegie stage for the soloist. His mother had seen the world from here and so had his grandfather. He thought of their journeys as he gazed into the heavens above the orchestra, the plight of his family and how in many ways, even unintentionally, they led here, to this, the most sacred of musical temples, a place where art, creativity, and freedom are worshipped. It was from here, he decided, that his journey would begin.
Igor looked up and saw the same security guard from earlier walking down the isle catching him on the stage.
“Sorry, I’m just leaving,” but the man didn’t reprimand him. Instead he picked up his violin case.
“Sha-Sha Streng’s son, huh? So, I guess you know how to play this thing?”
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Hey, I tell you what, my boss is on lunch, why don’t you give it a whirl?” The guard offered the case to Igor, but he just smiled.
“That’s okay,” he said hopping off the stage, “I’ve got a plane to catch, but I’ll be back someday soon.”
And with that, he collected his things and set out to explore his world.
The End.
Chapter 26
26.
“Sonata for Violin and Piano in A, Allegretto Poco Mosso: Franck”
If you happened to be standing on the south west corner of Twenty-first Street and Ninth Avenue the day before yesterday, there is a good chance you would have heard a familiar piano sonata by Cesar Franck drifting through the window and out onto the street, it’s notes clinging to the humid air in much the same way a spider clings to the ceiling above your bed. The Van-Der-Waals Force sounds far more musical then Surface Tension, which applies here more readily, and is reserved for creatures much smaller than humans. That is, depending upon one’s perspective. To heavenly beings, the way in which we cling to the earth could be seen in its own way as a similar phenomenon, but a spider has a sort of nimble quality that human’s lack. It was with this nimbleness that the music seemed to hang in the air, unconcerned that at any moment it might spin off into space, or get crushed under the dirty wheels of a speeding taxi.
Igor, who had been consumed with the concepts of perspective had set out on a journey to gain a little of his own. His destination was China, but before making the long trip--first to Berlin, then by boat to Shanghai--there were a few stops that needed to be made and a few gaps that needed to be filled in the story that consumed him. The first, a cluttered but spacious two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a brick building on twenty-first street, which was, and still is, the New York home of composer Max Schmied.
At ninety years old, Max was the very picture of health, and why shouldn’t he be? He had a team of doctors working around the clock to keep him at his functioning best. He smoked like a chimney but kept a tank of oxygen by the piano holding fast to a belief that it would counteract the effects. For every cigarette he smoked he would prescribe himself seven minutes of oxygen, and since the only time he didn’t have the urge to smoke was when he was playing, he would attach the tube to his nose creating a silhouette that was altogether decrepit, if he did say so himself--and he did to everyone who witnessed it.
His body was that of an ox. According to Max, it was his fragile hive of a mind that was succumbing to the cruelty of Father Time who he accused of taking a slingshot to the light bulbs on the once splendid Broadway marquee that was his brain. Lucky for Max, that marquee ran the length of Forty-second Street and reached not a few stories high. It would take Dennis the Menace himself years to vandalize it to any significant degree, but to Max, a desperate handyman fresh out of bulbs, the damage was done and the turkey was about to close.
Igor found his lighthearted complaining to be a source of endless entertainment, for the young man and the old had much in common. For example, they both found noisy bodily functions hysterical and could call on any number of them at a seconds notice. Though unrelated, they shared a similar intelligence and the gift of total recall that allowed them to burp any number of great Classical works in an attempt to stump the other. If stumped Igor would blame his youth, if Max got stumped he would blame the slingshot. Another binding factor where Max and Igor were concerned was the fact that they had both been apprentices of Maestro, albeit under vastly different circumstances. The way Max made it sound, Joshua had been a tyrant, liberal with beatings and reprimands, reducing the fragile Max to tears almost daily. It was probably why Max referred to his late master as “The Evil Chinaman” a nickname so vile it paralyzed Igor with a case of the nervous giggles the first time he heard it, at eight. He didn’t understand the anger, being that Maestro had never been violent with him. His mother told him that Uncle Max was prone to fabulist behavior and that he was cross with Maestro for things that had happened years ago.
Igor had his theories, but that’s all they were. He never got a straight answer from his Uncle Max whose only reply to his persistent questions was, “he turned into a Chimichanga,” followed by a little, very racist, very hysterical dance involving a folded piece of paper inserted under his top lip and the obligatory stretching back of the corners of his eyes. A display reserved for Igor and one not to be repeated when Sha-Sha was around, having, as Max put it, “the sense of humor of her mother.”
But this day would be different. Igor had plans for Uncle Max that didn’t involve the hilarity of burping Prokofiev. He wanted to know the one part of the story that Maestro would always leave out, what happened in New York?
Max’s living room was an experiment in color that had been neglected and allowed to fester unsupervised. The only surface that wasn’t striped, adorned with a fleur-de-lis, theatre poster, or sketch courtesy of Tom’s of Finland was the piano, a black shiny Steinway that according to Max was rescued from the General Slocum. Sha-Sha, who stopped visiting Max sometime in the mid-eighties, claimed this lie was created souly so Max could employ the usage of the word Slocum. Igor didn’t mind. He found Max’s stories funny and charming--it was just his way. And as far as Igor was concerned, Max had earned his eccentricities. He was famous and famous people were allowed, even encouraged, to be weird.
In fact, if you happened to be standing in the colorful parlor of Max Schmied, the day before yesterday, or any day when the weather allowed it, you would have noticed a motley looking crew of fans in shiny embroidered show jackets clutching laminated librettos with Sharpies at the ready. They would come to his window to listen to him play, the fresh faced high school students from out on the island, the middle-aged super fans who knew more about his work then he did, the curious tourists who only knew him for his televised hits, and occasionally the nostalgic local who wanted to say they’d heard him play so they could talk about it over dinner to impress friends from out of town.
They would come to listen, but the real reason for the vigil, the attraction that made it an attraction was the “Max factor,” as it came to be known.
Every last one of Max’s internal censors had abandoned him and he was prone to a kind of musical Tourettes Syndrome that took aim at his audience and the world, whatever came into his head or his sphere as he played. His regulars were the butt of many jokes, songs like, Stop Looking at Me Fat Lady, and Barry Has No Life. Some days he would fully engage with crowd, others he would play as if they weren’t there, blaming his silence on “a bad leg.” Of course the days his fans most look forward to were the ones when he played the hits that made him famous, but Max knew better than to give them that more than twice a year. For an entire month he would play the Beethoven Sonata’s interweaving his own familiar melodies to drive the crowd wild. Then he would tell them how pathetic they were and have his male nurse, Hans, offer them shot glasses of Ensure.
“Those idiots keep him alive,” was Sha-sha’s take on the whole situation, “someone ought to take a hose to them.”
When Igor entered the parlor that day he was greeted by Max’s biggest fan, Barry, whose face ruddy was forever pressed against the wrought iron bars of the small window closest to his piano.
“Hi, Igor!” Barry waved, encouraging a chorus of salutations from fans less in the know.
Igor greeted them and tossed his backpack and jacket on the couch. Max was already at the piano with his oxygen tube hooked firmly behind both ears like a transparent tapeworm sucking the life out of him through his nose.
“Franck, Piano Sonata in A,” Max croaked at the boy who quickly took the Lion from its case and began to play along. When they were done there was a sprinkling of applause followed by shouts of requests that Max shot down with vitriol. “Close the curtains, Iggy, the God damned show’s over.”
Igor did as he was told leaving the pair in the dark save for the flicker of Max’s cigarette lighter. Igor switched on a lamp and Max’s glossy eyes landed on the violin and bow that Igor held with one long-fingered hand.
“Is she dead?”
Igor smiled. He knew that Max was referring to his mother, the long time owner of the Stainer.
“No, she gave it to me.”
“Why? Giving isn’t in her nature, does she need a kidney or something?” Max’s accent still held the softest hint of German.
“Do you think it’s safe to smoke with that thing on your face, Uncle Max?” Igor took the cigarette from his hand and didn’t return it till the oxygen tank was turned tightly off.
Max laughed. “That’s how I’m gonna go, Iggy. I’m going to blow myself up. With any luck I’ll take Barry with me.”
“You want an eternity with Barry?”
Max lifted his frail shell of a body into his favorite smoking chair, they were all smoking chairs, and let his arms fall to rest at his sides like dead fish.
“Everybody needs to be adored by somebody,” and after a moment, “so…”
“What?” Igor plopped on the couch and lit a cigarette of his own.
“The Lion.”
“I don’t think I’ll tell you,” he teased sensing an opportunity for historical blackmail.
“It’s to be games then, is it? Do I have to guess?”
“You can guess.”
“She finally realized that you are better than her and the shame was too much to bear. She’s drinking the Kool-aid as we speak.”
“Nope, no Kool-aid.”
“You stole it?”
“I have an idea, you tell me what happened between you and Maestro and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Max leaned forward in his chair in an attempt to seem threatening, “you little shit. I won’t be blackmailed.”
Igor smiled and kicked his feet like an excited child.
“You stole it. You borrowed it in an attempt to blackmail me,” Igor tightened his lips, “you--you little shit.”
“I’m not going home, Max. After I leave here I have one more stop then I’m heading to the airport. I won’t be back for months. The Lion and I are going on a little trip.”
“To Shanghai?” all the playfulness left his voice as it dawned on the both of them that this might very well be their last meeting.
“By way of Berlin. I’ll be taking a slow boat to China.”
Max let the musical reference slip by unacknowledged. He lit another cigarette off the butt of the one he had just smoked down to its filter, and with a microscopic change of posture, slipped into flawless Mandarin as if it were nothing more than a silk robe.
Igor had never heard Max speak Mandarin though he assumed he could, and Igor’s was conversational at best. Still, he tried to follow along as he could sense that for Max, this was a story that existed in one singular language, like the prayer of a prairie dog to a star.
“Your grandfather,” he began, “was a pompous ass. And he was the only one who didn’t know it. You know all the stories, Iggy, you have heard them from his lips a thousand times and in each and every one Joshua was no doubt the star, the troubles romantic, the warrior prince. I loved him more than I have ever loved another person in my entire life. He was my father, my world, so you understand why I had to get away from him. When the war was over I went to San Francisco and quickly bored by it, slowly made my way eastward. I had built quite a little career for myself by the time he showed up on my doorstep. God, I was happy to see him, but happy in the way one might be if a relative were to come back from the dead, ecstatic at first, but then disturbed. His presence put a monkey wrench in the natural flow of things. I had already mourned him you see, so it was odd having him back. Odd to once again assume the role of second fiddle to the glorious Joshua Streng. Thing was, there was no Joshua Streng, not anymore. If there were people who knew who he was they weren’t in NY, most of them sadly, were probably as dead as Frau Schmetterling. This hurt Joshua. I had a blossoming career, and he was the aging violinist who lived with me. He didn’t speak English, which was a trial, having to translate everything for him (he didn’t want to learn, Igor) happy enough to be a burden on me as if I owed him something deep and private--this bond we shared. I was tired of it. Tired of his obsession with China, he spoke Mandarin in those days. People on the street thought he was crazy, a white man speaking Mandarin. It may as well have been tongues. I admit I was young and callous, but I wanted to move past the war. Joshua couldn’t. Then there was the constant talk of the girl, your grandmother, BaiLan. He never felt right about leaving her. And it was all he talked about. I can’t stress enough that it was the only conversation he wanted to have. He was like a broken record--obsessed. I would try to get him to work but when he did compose his pieces featured the erhu. My man down on Tin Pan Alley would have thought I was insane if I brought him that stuff. The only job I could get him was playing violin in the pit and that was not going to happen, as you could imagine. I was afraid to even suggest it to him in fear that he would bite my head off. I supported him for two years before losing it. Then that show came along.”
Max stopped and played an ominous chord progression on an invisible piano. Family lore had it that Joshua spent the first part of the fifties in New York with Max during the years he allegedly wrote Timbre on the Wind an early, initially ill fated, musical whose poster hung proudly over Max’s toilet. But then for some reason he left and went back to China.
“I was commissioned to write it but had about ten projects on my plate at the time so I told Joshua to do it. It was an ultimatum, do it or get a job. It was easy, just a musical, a love story with sappy ballads, and waltzes he could have lifted directly from Strauss. But what did he do? He got intellectual about it. He toiled over that silly piece of fluff till it shone with the twisted irony of a butter knife half hanging out of someone’s jugular vein. And it took him forever, what was supposed to only be a re-write became a lengthy hike through his dark corners of his soul. He tore down entire acts, changed characters and settings. He begged me to help him rehash the lyrics when the writer refused to let him do the whole show in German. It was a catastrophe and I was the one they blamed. Finally, over a year late, the show opened to lukewarm reviews and closed a week later. Joshua was distraught. He blamed everyone but himself for the failure (especially me) and went back to sulking, more introverted than ever. In those years, I traveled a lot. I kept our apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and would pay the bills dutifully every month with no help or even a word from him, as if it was expected. I didn’t mind. I was doing well for myself. At thirty-nine years old, I was well into the second swell of my career. I supported him as if he was an aging parent and he wasn’t even old. But did he care? Did he appreciate it? Of course not, never once did I get so much as a thank you from your Maestro, then one day I came home from a lengthy trip to Miami and found him gone. Back to China, the end of the world, his true home, was what his note said. It may as well have said, went out for milk. It was brief and callous; another testament to his selfishness.”
Max was winded by this point making it easy for Igor to interrupt, “And this is the source of the bad blood?” was what he meant to ask, though his pigeon Mandarin could be more accurately translated into, “This is where comes from the dirty fluid?” Max understood and continued in English.
“No, Igor. I understood. I loved him. Through it all I understood his pain. I even envied his sensitivity. It all went wrong for Maestro on that November day in Berlin. I don’t think he ever recovered from that, or if he did he was forever changed. The dirty fluid came ten years later when a small production company down on Forty-fifth Street mounted a revival production of Timbre on the Wind. The same people who had panned it in ’53 hailed it as a masterpiece in ’62. I got all the credit. His name was on it with mine as co-writer, but back then no one knew the name Joshua Streng from Adam. That minor detail fell away. I tried to get word to him but by then China was not a friendly place. He had built the perfect wall around himself, a vast communist country in which to hide, untouchable.”
Max lit another cigarette, rose from his chair and shuffled towards a cabinet adorned in glittering green and purple argyle. He had lost all grace in large movement but his fingers worked the tiny lock with the nimbleness usually reserved for insects.
“He sent me one letter when he was in China. Its date is July 1958. Your mother brought what was left of him back here in, oh, ’72?”
Max supported himself with one hand and extended a folded pack of papers to Igor held between his thumb and ring finger. His pointer and middle were comfortably hugging a cigarette.
“Perhaps this will give you a little of the perspective you’ve been searching for.”
Igor took the letter and turned it over in his hand. Then sensing the inevitable awkward goodbye, Max opened the curtains revealing Barry and the two or three other fans still hanging around outside his window. They were about to get the thrill of a lifetime.
As Igor looked on, Max played a slow montage of songs from Timbre on the Wind, his most famous work, the one he would be remembered for, a musical he had nothing to do with.
“Sonata for Violin and Piano in A, Allegretto Poco Mosso: Franck”
If you happened to be standing on the south west corner of Twenty-first Street and Ninth Avenue the day before yesterday, there is a good chance you would have heard a familiar piano sonata by Cesar Franck drifting through the window and out onto the street, it’s notes clinging to the humid air in much the same way a spider clings to the ceiling above your bed. The Van-Der-Waals Force sounds far more musical then Surface Tension, which applies here more readily, and is reserved for creatures much smaller than humans. That is, depending upon one’s perspective. To heavenly beings, the way in which we cling to the earth could be seen in its own way as a similar phenomenon, but a spider has a sort of nimble quality that human’s lack. It was with this nimbleness that the music seemed to hang in the air, unconcerned that at any moment it might spin off into space, or get crushed under the dirty wheels of a speeding taxi.
Igor, who had been consumed with the concepts of perspective had set out on a journey to gain a little of his own. His destination was China, but before making the long trip--first to Berlin, then by boat to Shanghai--there were a few stops that needed to be made and a few gaps that needed to be filled in the story that consumed him. The first, a cluttered but spacious two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a brick building on twenty-first street, which was, and still is, the New York home of composer Max Schmied.
At ninety years old, Max was the very picture of health, and why shouldn’t he be? He had a team of doctors working around the clock to keep him at his functioning best. He smoked like a chimney but kept a tank of oxygen by the piano holding fast to a belief that it would counteract the effects. For every cigarette he smoked he would prescribe himself seven minutes of oxygen, and since the only time he didn’t have the urge to smoke was when he was playing, he would attach the tube to his nose creating a silhouette that was altogether decrepit, if he did say so himself--and he did to everyone who witnessed it.
His body was that of an ox. According to Max, it was his fragile hive of a mind that was succumbing to the cruelty of Father Time who he accused of taking a slingshot to the light bulbs on the once splendid Broadway marquee that was his brain. Lucky for Max, that marquee ran the length of Forty-second Street and reached not a few stories high. It would take Dennis the Menace himself years to vandalize it to any significant degree, but to Max, a desperate handyman fresh out of bulbs, the damage was done and the turkey was about to close.
Igor found his lighthearted complaining to be a source of endless entertainment, for the young man and the old had much in common. For example, they both found noisy bodily functions hysterical and could call on any number of them at a seconds notice. Though unrelated, they shared a similar intelligence and the gift of total recall that allowed them to burp any number of great Classical works in an attempt to stump the other. If stumped Igor would blame his youth, if Max got stumped he would blame the slingshot. Another binding factor where Max and Igor were concerned was the fact that they had both been apprentices of Maestro, albeit under vastly different circumstances. The way Max made it sound, Joshua had been a tyrant, liberal with beatings and reprimands, reducing the fragile Max to tears almost daily. It was probably why Max referred to his late master as “The Evil Chinaman” a nickname so vile it paralyzed Igor with a case of the nervous giggles the first time he heard it, at eight. He didn’t understand the anger, being that Maestro had never been violent with him. His mother told him that Uncle Max was prone to fabulist behavior and that he was cross with Maestro for things that had happened years ago.
Igor had his theories, but that’s all they were. He never got a straight answer from his Uncle Max whose only reply to his persistent questions was, “he turned into a Chimichanga,” followed by a little, very racist, very hysterical dance involving a folded piece of paper inserted under his top lip and the obligatory stretching back of the corners of his eyes. A display reserved for Igor and one not to be repeated when Sha-Sha was around, having, as Max put it, “the sense of humor of her mother.”
But this day would be different. Igor had plans for Uncle Max that didn’t involve the hilarity of burping Prokofiev. He wanted to know the one part of the story that Maestro would always leave out, what happened in New York?
Max’s living room was an experiment in color that had been neglected and allowed to fester unsupervised. The only surface that wasn’t striped, adorned with a fleur-de-lis, theatre poster, or sketch courtesy of Tom’s of Finland was the piano, a black shiny Steinway that according to Max was rescued from the General Slocum. Sha-Sha, who stopped visiting Max sometime in the mid-eighties, claimed this lie was created souly so Max could employ the usage of the word Slocum. Igor didn’t mind. He found Max’s stories funny and charming--it was just his way. And as far as Igor was concerned, Max had earned his eccentricities. He was famous and famous people were allowed, even encouraged, to be weird.
In fact, if you happened to be standing in the colorful parlor of Max Schmied, the day before yesterday, or any day when the weather allowed it, you would have noticed a motley looking crew of fans in shiny embroidered show jackets clutching laminated librettos with Sharpies at the ready. They would come to his window to listen to him play, the fresh faced high school students from out on the island, the middle-aged super fans who knew more about his work then he did, the curious tourists who only knew him for his televised hits, and occasionally the nostalgic local who wanted to say they’d heard him play so they could talk about it over dinner to impress friends from out of town.
They would come to listen, but the real reason for the vigil, the attraction that made it an attraction was the “Max factor,” as it came to be known.
Every last one of Max’s internal censors had abandoned him and he was prone to a kind of musical Tourettes Syndrome that took aim at his audience and the world, whatever came into his head or his sphere as he played. His regulars were the butt of many jokes, songs like, Stop Looking at Me Fat Lady, and Barry Has No Life. Some days he would fully engage with crowd, others he would play as if they weren’t there, blaming his silence on “a bad leg.” Of course the days his fans most look forward to were the ones when he played the hits that made him famous, but Max knew better than to give them that more than twice a year. For an entire month he would play the Beethoven Sonata’s interweaving his own familiar melodies to drive the crowd wild. Then he would tell them how pathetic they were and have his male nurse, Hans, offer them shot glasses of Ensure.
“Those idiots keep him alive,” was Sha-sha’s take on the whole situation, “someone ought to take a hose to them.”
When Igor entered the parlor that day he was greeted by Max’s biggest fan, Barry, whose face ruddy was forever pressed against the wrought iron bars of the small window closest to his piano.
“Hi, Igor!” Barry waved, encouraging a chorus of salutations from fans less in the know.
Igor greeted them and tossed his backpack and jacket on the couch. Max was already at the piano with his oxygen tube hooked firmly behind both ears like a transparent tapeworm sucking the life out of him through his nose.
“Franck, Piano Sonata in A,” Max croaked at the boy who quickly took the Lion from its case and began to play along. When they were done there was a sprinkling of applause followed by shouts of requests that Max shot down with vitriol. “Close the curtains, Iggy, the God damned show’s over.”
Igor did as he was told leaving the pair in the dark save for the flicker of Max’s cigarette lighter. Igor switched on a lamp and Max’s glossy eyes landed on the violin and bow that Igor held with one long-fingered hand.
“Is she dead?”
Igor smiled. He knew that Max was referring to his mother, the long time owner of the Stainer.
“No, she gave it to me.”
“Why? Giving isn’t in her nature, does she need a kidney or something?” Max’s accent still held the softest hint of German.
“Do you think it’s safe to smoke with that thing on your face, Uncle Max?” Igor took the cigarette from his hand and didn’t return it till the oxygen tank was turned tightly off.
Max laughed. “That’s how I’m gonna go, Iggy. I’m going to blow myself up. With any luck I’ll take Barry with me.”
“You want an eternity with Barry?”
Max lifted his frail shell of a body into his favorite smoking chair, they were all smoking chairs, and let his arms fall to rest at his sides like dead fish.
“Everybody needs to be adored by somebody,” and after a moment, “so…”
“What?” Igor plopped on the couch and lit a cigarette of his own.
“The Lion.”
“I don’t think I’ll tell you,” he teased sensing an opportunity for historical blackmail.
“It’s to be games then, is it? Do I have to guess?”
“You can guess.”
“She finally realized that you are better than her and the shame was too much to bear. She’s drinking the Kool-aid as we speak.”
“Nope, no Kool-aid.”
“You stole it?”
“I have an idea, you tell me what happened between you and Maestro and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Max leaned forward in his chair in an attempt to seem threatening, “you little shit. I won’t be blackmailed.”
Igor smiled and kicked his feet like an excited child.
“You stole it. You borrowed it in an attempt to blackmail me,” Igor tightened his lips, “you--you little shit.”
“I’m not going home, Max. After I leave here I have one more stop then I’m heading to the airport. I won’t be back for months. The Lion and I are going on a little trip.”
“To Shanghai?” all the playfulness left his voice as it dawned on the both of them that this might very well be their last meeting.
“By way of Berlin. I’ll be taking a slow boat to China.”
Max let the musical reference slip by unacknowledged. He lit another cigarette off the butt of the one he had just smoked down to its filter, and with a microscopic change of posture, slipped into flawless Mandarin as if it were nothing more than a silk robe.
Igor had never heard Max speak Mandarin though he assumed he could, and Igor’s was conversational at best. Still, he tried to follow along as he could sense that for Max, this was a story that existed in one singular language, like the prayer of a prairie dog to a star.
“Your grandfather,” he began, “was a pompous ass. And he was the only one who didn’t know it. You know all the stories, Iggy, you have heard them from his lips a thousand times and in each and every one Joshua was no doubt the star, the troubles romantic, the warrior prince. I loved him more than I have ever loved another person in my entire life. He was my father, my world, so you understand why I had to get away from him. When the war was over I went to San Francisco and quickly bored by it, slowly made my way eastward. I had built quite a little career for myself by the time he showed up on my doorstep. God, I was happy to see him, but happy in the way one might be if a relative were to come back from the dead, ecstatic at first, but then disturbed. His presence put a monkey wrench in the natural flow of things. I had already mourned him you see, so it was odd having him back. Odd to once again assume the role of second fiddle to the glorious Joshua Streng. Thing was, there was no Joshua Streng, not anymore. If there were people who knew who he was they weren’t in NY, most of them sadly, were probably as dead as Frau Schmetterling. This hurt Joshua. I had a blossoming career, and he was the aging violinist who lived with me. He didn’t speak English, which was a trial, having to translate everything for him (he didn’t want to learn, Igor) happy enough to be a burden on me as if I owed him something deep and private--this bond we shared. I was tired of it. Tired of his obsession with China, he spoke Mandarin in those days. People on the street thought he was crazy, a white man speaking Mandarin. It may as well have been tongues. I admit I was young and callous, but I wanted to move past the war. Joshua couldn’t. Then there was the constant talk of the girl, your grandmother, BaiLan. He never felt right about leaving her. And it was all he talked about. I can’t stress enough that it was the only conversation he wanted to have. He was like a broken record--obsessed. I would try to get him to work but when he did compose his pieces featured the erhu. My man down on Tin Pan Alley would have thought I was insane if I brought him that stuff. The only job I could get him was playing violin in the pit and that was not going to happen, as you could imagine. I was afraid to even suggest it to him in fear that he would bite my head off. I supported him for two years before losing it. Then that show came along.”
Max stopped and played an ominous chord progression on an invisible piano. Family lore had it that Joshua spent the first part of the fifties in New York with Max during the years he allegedly wrote Timbre on the Wind an early, initially ill fated, musical whose poster hung proudly over Max’s toilet. But then for some reason he left and went back to China.
“I was commissioned to write it but had about ten projects on my plate at the time so I told Joshua to do it. It was an ultimatum, do it or get a job. It was easy, just a musical, a love story with sappy ballads, and waltzes he could have lifted directly from Strauss. But what did he do? He got intellectual about it. He toiled over that silly piece of fluff till it shone with the twisted irony of a butter knife half hanging out of someone’s jugular vein. And it took him forever, what was supposed to only be a re-write became a lengthy hike through his dark corners of his soul. He tore down entire acts, changed characters and settings. He begged me to help him rehash the lyrics when the writer refused to let him do the whole show in German. It was a catastrophe and I was the one they blamed. Finally, over a year late, the show opened to lukewarm reviews and closed a week later. Joshua was distraught. He blamed everyone but himself for the failure (especially me) and went back to sulking, more introverted than ever. In those years, I traveled a lot. I kept our apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and would pay the bills dutifully every month with no help or even a word from him, as if it was expected. I didn’t mind. I was doing well for myself. At thirty-nine years old, I was well into the second swell of my career. I supported him as if he was an aging parent and he wasn’t even old. But did he care? Did he appreciate it? Of course not, never once did I get so much as a thank you from your Maestro, then one day I came home from a lengthy trip to Miami and found him gone. Back to China, the end of the world, his true home, was what his note said. It may as well have said, went out for milk. It was brief and callous; another testament to his selfishness.”
Max was winded by this point making it easy for Igor to interrupt, “And this is the source of the bad blood?” was what he meant to ask, though his pigeon Mandarin could be more accurately translated into, “This is where comes from the dirty fluid?” Max understood and continued in English.
“No, Igor. I understood. I loved him. Through it all I understood his pain. I even envied his sensitivity. It all went wrong for Maestro on that November day in Berlin. I don’t think he ever recovered from that, or if he did he was forever changed. The dirty fluid came ten years later when a small production company down on Forty-fifth Street mounted a revival production of Timbre on the Wind. The same people who had panned it in ’53 hailed it as a masterpiece in ’62. I got all the credit. His name was on it with mine as co-writer, but back then no one knew the name Joshua Streng from Adam. That minor detail fell away. I tried to get word to him but by then China was not a friendly place. He had built the perfect wall around himself, a vast communist country in which to hide, untouchable.”
Max lit another cigarette, rose from his chair and shuffled towards a cabinet adorned in glittering green and purple argyle. He had lost all grace in large movement but his fingers worked the tiny lock with the nimbleness usually reserved for insects.
“He sent me one letter when he was in China. Its date is July 1958. Your mother brought what was left of him back here in, oh, ’72?”
Max supported himself with one hand and extended a folded pack of papers to Igor held between his thumb and ring finger. His pointer and middle were comfortably hugging a cigarette.
“Perhaps this will give you a little of the perspective you’ve been searching for.”
Igor took the letter and turned it over in his hand. Then sensing the inevitable awkward goodbye, Max opened the curtains revealing Barry and the two or three other fans still hanging around outside his window. They were about to get the thrill of a lifetime.
As Igor looked on, Max played a slow montage of songs from Timbre on the Wind, his most famous work, the one he would be remembered for, a musical he had nothing to do with.
Chapter 25
25.
“Fantasia In C, "Wanderer" Adagio: Schubert”
It was raining violently the evening that BaiLan showed up on the doorstep of Dean Chen, a thick syrupy rain that fell to the ground in fist sized drops out of a purple sky. All the withered Dean saw when he opened the door was a figure slumped and soaked like a wet rat after a showdown with a broom, and then from the shadow, a small oval face with bloodshot eyes like garnets. He didn’t recognize her at first. She had gotten painfully thin in the year and a half since he’d seen her, and her hair was different. She had cut it. Cropped it into a bob that was plastered to the sides of her face. She was shivering--no wonder--he thought, she wasn’t wearing a coat, she was soaking wet, and in the lamplight, when she stepped into it, he was able to make out a series of bruises that began on her neck and traveled down the length of her back fading out of sight beneath her thin shawl. He adjusted his spectacles and squinted.
“BaiLan?” he whispered. She fell into his arms.
The Chen family were nothing if not charitable and didn’t think twice about taking Miss Bai in and nursing her back to health. They refrained from questions, making sure that above all she was comfortable, and though she was grateful for their kindness, BaiLan didn’t speak more than a few words during the first week of her stay. Mrs. Chen had to employ a host of different sneaky tactics to try and persuade her to eat, and did her best to hold her tongue as she treated the marks that covered the girl’s back.
When BaiLan was feeling stronger she mustered the courage to ask Dean Chen if he knew the whereabouts of Maestro Streng, and the ever-earnest Dean had no choice but to tell the truth, he hadn’t seen Joshua since the Japanese surrendered. Then as far as he knew, both he and Max fled Shanghai.
“All the westerners are gone. Many of them took ships to America. California, they say. Others went back to Europe. Not that I blame them. Their war is over, ours continues. Ours never ends.”
After receiving this blow, BaiLan stopped eating all together and refused to get out of bed. She was plagued by violent dreams of being chased, occasionally taking refuge in the closet or under the bed while still wrapped in her nightmare. She would wake not knowing where she was. It was disconcerting not only to BaiLan but to whoever found her, claws curled in a corner like a scared cat. She requested that all the windows and door be locked tight when she slept, as she had developed a fear of wandering away. She begged the Chen family not tell anyone that she was there. To keep her a secret while she waited for Maestro Streng to come for her.
After several weeks, Mrs. Chen began to get nervous regarding their houseguest and shared her concerns with her husband over dinner, a third of which would end up in the trash. What if BaiLan was a fugitive? What if by harboring her they risked being implicated themselves in what ever the girl had gotten herself involved in? Chen promised his wife that he would have a talk with Miss Bai as soon as she was feeling better, but as the days past she seemed only to deteriorate. They feared the worst, that she had lost the will to live, and not able to accept her blood on his hands, Dean Chen implored her.
“I care for you as if you were one of my own children,” he told her. “I watched you grow up, I saw you develop into a brilliant young musician…” And on and on like this for a long while, then he said, “I need you to tell me what happened to you so I can help.” He asked, “are you in trouble with the authorities? Have you done something you think cannot be undone? Because much can be undone, LanLan.”
She wanted to tell him. She really did. But there was too much stopping her. An aneurism of history blocking up the words, making them impossible to say. How could she tell this man, one who had known her since childhood, of the horrible indignities she had been forced to suffer as penance for her love? It was the old pride rearing its ugly head again. It was the pristine BaiLan, the virginal statue; the apple of her parent’s eye. If she told Dean Chen all that had happened, all the repugnant, deplorable things HongWei had done in the name of her salvation, she would never be able to look him in the eye again. As she saw it, BaiLan had two choices, she could die or she could leave. And since Dean Chen expressed passionate disapproval to the former, she felt she owed it to him to go on living, after all he had nearly saved her life. Only one question remained; where would she go?
“I can get you a commission in Harbin. There is a school and they are in need of a music teacher. It’s as far from Hong Kong as I could manage. I hope you like the cold.” Dean Chen forced a smile and scratched the back of his head.
“I don’t mind it.”
“You don’t know. You haven’t felt cold till you’ve experienced a Manchurian winter. It freezes the marrow in your bones.”
“It’s far way. That’s all that matters.”
“What about your parents? If they come looking for you should I tell them where you--”
BaiLan’s face lost what little color it still had.
“No. Please. No one is to know,” she sank to her knees before the Dean in a dramatic gesture of desperation.
“Please, Dean Chen, there is only one person in the world who can know where I’ve gone. Maestro Streng. Everyone else, believe me when I tell you that they no longer have my best interests in mind.”
The soft-spoken Dean placed a hand on her shoulder. She attempted to play off the flinch his touch evoked with a grin. “You have my word,” he offered a hand and lifted her to her feet. “Now, enough of this foolishness. If you want the commission there is much work to be done. We will eat, you must fatten up for the Harbin winter, and then, I have been working on a new piece by Schubert that I’d like your opinion on.”
A week later, BaiLan was on a train heading north to Beijing where she would catch her train to Harbin. The scenery that speed past her window was breathtaking, but she didn’t notice. BaiLan didn’t notice much anymore, preoccupied as she was, with memories she had painstakingly edited into a newsreel of highlights. It started with Joshua. Their walks, playing Beethoven for Madame Butterfly, the day he embraced her in that darkened hallway in HongKew, but it always ended with HongWei. Even when she tried to direct the flow of her thoughts, they would get the better of her and boil down to the bitter and crass question that began it all.
“How many times were you with him?”
He would ask her this constantly. For the first time in the car after he had abducted her and every day after. When she refused to answer he would put it to her during their atonement sessions, and eventually, with the help of a cane, he coaxed a number out of her.
She said thirteen, a lie only the naive HongWei would believe. In the end she would see the error in this. She should have told him the truth, perhaps then he would have written her off, intimidated beyond all repair. Either that or she should have convinced him she had retained her virtue, it was not an impossible thing to fake. Women had been known to do it quite convincingly with a small vile of pig’s blood carefully palmed on the wedding night. But by giving him a number that was so attainably low, made the relationship she had with Joshua seem little more than casual to HongWei. This only increased his frustration with BaiLan and his hatred of Streng who must have known of her affection towards him and used it as a way to relieve himself on thirteen different occasions. He had used her, and she was too much in love to see that. But at HongWei’s core he couldn’t totally blame her for her weak feminine heart, he still felt she was redeemable.
As for her parents, they knew nothing of what was happening under their noses, or if they did, their eyes were closed. She had embraced her father when HongWei brought her back. She begged him to let her return to Shanghai, but he only frowned. “You tried, LanLan, but it is time to resume your family duties.” Her father looked through her, they all did. Except HongWei. It was as if an arrangement had been made in her absence, one that gave him total control over her person if her were able to bring her back. As time passed, BaiLan began to see that HongWei’s reign extended over the whole family. He and his brothers patrolled that apartment as if it were one of their military posts. Constantly questioning, taking stock of who left and when.
BaiLan wasn’t allowed out of the flat unless accompanied by one of them, usually a brother, for a trip to the park or to the market to shop for the inevitable wedding. Then, once a week, HongWei would come for her and drag her, sometimes kicking and screaming, to his flat down the road, where she would be subjected to hours of torture as he racked his brain trying to come up with a suitable punishment, one that would purify her for marriage.
He give her mindless tasks to repeat in cycles of thirteen while chanting humiliating mantras of apology. He tried beating her. Thirteen strokes at a time, but it wasn’t enough. He cut her hair but he still didn’t feel vindicated. This went on for weeks until he eventually came to the only conclusion that would make things truly square in his mind.
The key was thirteen. Everything came down to that one number. It was what he saw when he looked at her. Even as he beat her he was unable to wipe the number from his mind, or erase the picture of her copulating with the ugly westerner. Thirteen stairs to their apartment, thirteen buttons on her dress as he undid them with shaking hands to reveal her white back. Sometimes the ghost of thirteen cane marks from the week prior. Nothing he did could separate her from the number. Even if she was lying, which he suspected she was, it was the number she had given him and therefore the only one he had. He wanted to erase the number to subtract it forever but since he couldn’t he decided on a system of negation. He explained it to her in detail.
“I can’t marry you like this, BaiLan,” he told her as he paced floor around the chair to which she clung, “I have gone over it in my mind many times but it is no good. You have put things out of balance, BaiLan. By letting that violinist violate you, you have made it impossible for me to ever accept you as a wife.”
“I don’t want to be your wife,” BaiLan said through gritted teeth, but HongWei had stopped listening to her months ago, she was hardly in the room. It was only him and his blinding insecurity.
“We must even the score, BaiLan. Only then will I be able to respect you.”
“I don’t want your respect.”
“It will be like,” he searched for the word, “a ritual. I don’t intend to look at you when I do it. I won’t touch you with my hands. It will be a loveless act, like it was for your beloved Maestro. Then, when we are even, we shall be married and I will embrace you as a wife. On that day we will both know what it really means to love.”
“I will never love you.”
This HongWei heard and turned on her like a tiger. “You only say that because you are still under his spell. All the more reason why what I suggest is necessary.”
That was how it began. A systematic series of rapes to make things even in the eyes of her intended. HongWei had it figured to the letter. His brothers would be present as witnesses and to restrain his lovely fiancée if she was in a struggling mood. It would be quick and clean--always the former, seldom the latter--as BaiLan fought him every time.
It wasn’t so much the act itself, which was less horrible than it was unpleasant, nor was it the humiliation of having his leering brothers there, pretending to look away as they held down her arms, while he did his pathetic business below the folds of her dress. No, the worst part about it was that it was working exactly the way HongWei had planned. Every time he forced himself on her, he would force out a little of the memory she had of Joshua, till an act that had once been only a source of good memories became a tainted with violence and revenge.
It wasn’t long before HongWei’s formality began to melt in the heat of his passion. Soon he had started creeping into her bedroom at night and pinning her down, breathing heavily into her ear. She would have screamed, but she knew she would not survive the shame that would come if her parents were to find out. His precious number thirteen came and went, as did the ritualistic aspect of the assaults as he began to come to her daily getting lost in obsessive protestations. He couldn’t stop himself, he said. He thought about her constantly it was affecting his work. He said he loved her, he needed to be near her, inside her, now, always, again. He wanted to make love to her, to caress her, to kiss her, to be naked with her, and asked if she felt it too. How could she not?
It was his love more than all the rest of it that pushed BaiLan to her breaking point. Even if it meant loosing her family, she could not endure it and its sticky realities any longer.
She made her escape during a shopping trip with the brothers, slipping out of a store while their backs were turned. She had no money, no clothes except the ones on her back, but she ran. She ran and didn’t look back till she made it to Shanghai, half-expecting to see HongWei at her heels when she finally turned to check for him that rainy night on Dean Chen’s porch, the sky the color of a rotten plum or a black eye.
Harbin is a city of unparalleled beauty in every season but it is in winter that she really comes into her own. Like a beautiful girl who stays silent until the cold descends, then opens her mouth to sings like an angel. Harbin’s angels were carved out of ice, as was everything else during the winter months. An entire parallel city built to rival the existing non-transparent one. It sparkled into existence as soon as the first frost descended, block-by-block, angel-by-angel, flower-by-flower and bird-by-bird. By whatever the ice-sculptors, professional and non-professional could dream up.
She boasted ice archways and ice columns thirty feet high, ice alters, ice gardens, ice rinks, ice animals, ice children, ice to eat flavored with colored sugar. Ice hotels with ice beds and ice furniture. Ice restaurants with cold food served on plates made of ice. Ice forests, ice fortresses, and ice mazes lit in a kaleidoscope of colors. Irreverent candleholders made of ice clung to brave ice walls—oh, how they tempted fate!
It was this sensory feast that greeted Joshua in the winter of ’49 when he first set foot in the grand northern city. It was such a shocking change from the warm, wet mud and saturated greenery of Taiwan that it shredded his senses to the point of euphoria.
The frost settled in his beard and he loosened the strings on both The Lion and his ehru to prevent stress. When he lost his footing and slipped, for the first time of many slips to follow, he broke out into a great rolling laugh, one that prompted children in red caps and ice skates to come rescue him as if they were part of some obscure branch of the Red Cross reserved for ice festivals of inordinate size.
It was a winter wonderland like no other and it pleased him. To be bundled against the cold made him feel alive, sharp, and energized. He who had grown used to the weight of humidity, the lethargy of heat, the oppression of sunlight, it felt as if he had been set free, like a spark leaping gleefully from a fire. He was excited too, for he was told that this was the city where he would find BaiLan.
When Joshua showed up on the steps of the Chen house it was a scene comically similar to the one two years earlier that had revealed BaiLan. It was raining, great hulking drops against a gray and crimson sky, and Joshua was wet. He didn’t have more than a threadbare coat covering him and he looked thin. Still, it didn’t take Dean Chen a minute to realize it was him, Joshua would forever stand out against any Chinese backdrop like a giraffe attempting to blend in with heard of horses.
“We had very nearly given up on you,” the old man said, cleaning his spectacles. Then he smiled and welcomed Joshua in. Mrs. Chen cooked and over dinner he told them his story. They were truly amazed and saddened by it for it seemed the young man had been through so much in his short life. They knew, you see, more about the atrocities coming to light in Europe than Joshua did having been on the island for two years. They knew what had happened to his wife and had nothing good to report about BaiLan. Their end of the tale was not easy to relate since they didn’t want to add to his burden with another series of unanswered questions, still they had honored BaiLan with the truth as they knew it and would do the same for Maestro Streng. In the end he was grateful. They knew where she was, just as he suspected they would.
Unlike BaiLan, Joshua didn’t stay on at the Chen’s for very long. He was out the door the following day with his nose pointed northward in search of BaiLan and a way out of China with her on his arm. He decided that they had suffered enough. Unfortunately it was not a decision he was qualified to make. He knew this, but hoped for the best, as if positive thought could somehow influence fate.
For the record, it cannot.
It didn’t take him long to find her. He slipped and slid his way to the school where he was told she worked and walked right in. It was Sunday, but something told him that he would find her there.
BaiLan had always been obsessive when it came to practicing. He recalled a story she had told him about her childhood. A fantasy of waking up in a room that had in it nothing but her cello and piles upon piles of sheet music. If she broke a string or got hungry, the things she needed would be slipped to her through a small opening in the wall, but beyond that it was to be pure solitude. She wanted to be imprisoned with her instrument, to perfect every piece of music ever written for the cello, and have all the time in the world to do it.
On that snowy day--it had started to snow as Joshua made his way to the school--BaiLan was not engaged in the cello but gazing out of the window as one of her pupils practiced his Mozart at the piano.
Reflected in her eyes flakes as big as feathers landed softly on the ice menagerie her students had been raising since late November. She had her arms crossed against her chest and she wore a red sweater, the only color in the room. Her hair was short which made the viewing of her shoulders infinitely less complicated. When the boy came to the end of his piece, BaiLan whispered, “Wieder.”
“I’m sorry, teacher?” the child asked, having heard but not understood his mistress.
“Again,” Joshua instructed from the doorway where he had been standing.
BaiLan turned as if the word was a bullet fired from the past into her heart. Moving so quickly that she nearly left her shoes behind her, she ran to him and tackled his chest with the force of a giant magnet or a thousand speeding flowers.
“Mien Blume,” He whispered.
She said nothing, she couldn’t, she only held him and wept.
The student at the piano watched the scene with a slack jaw till Joshua instructed him to play his piece again. And play it he did, three times before BaiLan released her grip. When she released him she wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t vanish into a cloud of steam or even worse end up being the janitor. She looked into Joshua’s face with wonder as if doing so, would heal her every wound.
BaiLan dismissed her pupil without breaking her gaze and asked the question that had been part of her for over three years.
“Where have you been?”
That afternoon the reunited lovers walked slowly through the ice city arm in arm. It had been so long since their walks in Shanghai but they fell into step together as if perhaps only a few days had passed. For a long while they were silent, watching a gaggle of children in red scarves make figure eights around an ice statue of Chairman Mao wearing its own, slightly larger, red scarf made form paper. Then finally, Joshua spoke.
“Can you forgive me, LanLan?”
She answered his question with one of her own.
“Can you forgive me?”
“For what? I’m the one who failed you.”
“You didn’t fail me. You’re here. And I don’t care what kept you. I am certain that you got here as soon as was humanly possible.”
Joshua thought of his Taiwanese meditation sessions and his heart sizzled with guilt. He could have gotten to her sooner if he tried, but now was not the time to be confessing such things, he would keep it from her to spare her feelings, for wasn’t he happy just to be with her now?
“I got here as soon as I could,” he told her, for anything else would have been barbaric.
As they walked on further through the ice city, BaiLan opened up like a clam upon contact with boiling water. She told him about her school, about her students--some of who showed real promise, she shared everything that was positive and beautiful about her life, leaving out the past, leaving out HongWei. Joshua wasn’t the only one concerned with sparing feelings. But for BaiLan it went even deeper than that. She had spent the past two years trying to forget what had happened to her, if it remained unspoken it remained powerless. She had no intention of ever telling Joshua, or anyone about HongWei. She would focus only on the good.
Soon they came upon BaiLan’s favorite attraction, The Crystal Maze. She had been through it several times already, but promised Joshua that he could decide on all the turns without any help from her. They bought two tickets from the old man who hurried them along.
“No dilly-dallying, I want to go home.” BaiLan lowered the fur-collar of her coat to smile at him, and he waved a finger of recognition. “You know this maze, make it quick.”
She insisted on going through in her ice skates, which had Joshua enthralled. Citizens of Harbin all owned ice skates. Retractable ones were installed at birth, laying in wait during the useless summer months like un-switched switchblades, till the ice came to release their trigger and set their shiny blades free. BaiLan was the perfect candidate for the things, long limbed and graceful. Joshua shuffled along behind her clinging to the ice wall like a toddler moments before taking his first steps and handicapped as he was, he too felt set free. The cold, the dizzying cold, it made his body heat up like a baked potato inside of his coat, while his extremities froze, his cheeks burned and his head throbbed. He grabbed his swan and pinned her back to the icy wall.
“I love it here, it makes me feel alive.” Then he reached into the folds of her coat and ran his hands up the small of her back to where her skirt ended and her red sweater began. His cold hands made contact with her baked potato skin, which was most certainly of the sweet or fingerling variety, and she let out a high-pitched cry that cut Joshua to the loins.
Suddenly the prospect of making love to her there, on the ice seemed like the best idea anyone had ever had. The glorious heat combined with the freezing cold would be an experiment in extremity he wasn’t willing to pass up, so he kissed her to smother her cries, and with their mouths joined he threw off his coat and let it fall to the ground.
He searched for more flesh by way of the zipper that held up her skirt and let it fall to her knees. But his present would not be opened so easily. There were her wool stockings to contend with, which he decided to will off of her, applying pressure skillfully to key areas above them till they magically came down on their own. A moment later after a tinkling of icy fingers worked at his worn belt buckle he felt himself exposed to the elements--first relief, then cold, then with a gentle push, the fiery inferno of Hades itself wrapping around him and holding on for dear life.
It was in this conjoined manner that they fell to the ice, he couldn’t secure the footing to do to her what was so direly necessary by that point with out slipping comically away like a pornographic Charlie Chaplin, so they relocated to the ice each in turn experiencing the simultaneously wicked and soothing feeling of it burning their bare skin.
Everything was hot, even the ice, which had begun to melt beneath them till their bodies sloshes in a tepid wading pool. With the moisture making him seasick, and her tears burning his lips, the current inside of him broke and crashed into her like a sub-marine lava flow. Three years were the words that appeared above the scale, repeating with no rest between them. Three years, as he pressed into her, giving her everything he had, most of which collected in the oyster shell they had left in the ice, the concave hole of love in which she sat, legs spread in the collecting murk. It seemed yellow against the pristine white of the snow, the way the teeth of a Geisha do when she is in the white face of her trade. He pictured it re-freezing when they had long gone. His essence left behind to be trod and skated upon by winter revelers, till spring of course when his children would go to their graves in mud.
He stayed inside of her until it became painful and then stayed longer. It was this quietly chaotic moment that she usually reserved for her own climax. On the mattress in Shanghai she had explained that his willingness to suffer was what put her over the edge, she had said it in jest, but there was no getting past its truth. That day he intended to suffer inside of her until his balls froze.
But there was no sound from BaiLan. No moans as her hips manipulated his recent gift of Geisha teeth tinted, illuminated lubrication. She was stone, and her eyes teared, not from the cold as his did, but from some internal source. They didn’t meet his either. Her head was turned and cast down. Everything about her body language pulled away from him until he had no choice but to pull away from her.
“LanLan, what’s wrong?” Her skin began to turn blue. “Besides the obvious, LanLan?” He tried to laugh as he used his coat to dry her, as he pulled her stockings back up around her doll’s hips, as he refastened her skirt and closed her coat all of this with his own pants still around his knees. He made a crass joke about frozen bratwurst. But she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Did I hurt you? LanLan tell me what’s wrong.”
Eventually, she blubbered an excuse about being overwhelmed with emotion, and part of her believed it too. Part of her believed that HongWei had nothing to do with the equation. But as the days past, tension grew between the newly reunited couple, so much so, that it had Joshua questioning his northward journey altogether.
First off, she wouldn’t let him touch her; even handholding had her pulling away. She was far more impatient than he remembered and seemed to be easily irritated by trivial things, like the state of the bathroom or a dirty bowl left out overnight. She had all but quit the cello; she didn’t even have one in her home--a tiny pair of rooms allocated to her by the school. And that was a whole other problem. She was breaking the rules by allowing Joshua to stay with her. Teachers weren’t allowed to have long-term houseguests as it was considered to be morally questionable by the powers that be. This was a source of constant worry for BaiLan, who would clam up and not speak when Joshua suggested that they simply find other lodging, or even better, leave China. Move to Europe, America, Argentina, anywhere but there.
He wanted to conduct again, to compose, to travel, and her ludicrous response to this was that she had to think of her students. It’s not that Joshua didn’t understand, but really, they had been through so much. It was almost as if she were trying to drive him away on purpose.
The night Joshua left, they had had a terrible fight. The headmaster of the school found out he’d living in her quarters and gave them a three-day ultimatum. BaiLan’s brilliant suggestion was that Joshua find his own lodging nearby and visit with her from time to time. Her words delivered a sting he could not recover from.
“Things have changed,” she said, then closed her bedroom door and wept the entire night away.
Joshua listened for several hours. He wondered what she was crying about? After all, she was the one ending it. Women do that, or so he had heard. Remove the love and there is still emotion, still the pain of loss, still an overwhelming sense of guilt at being the one bringing down the axe, so in essence, she was crying for herself and he knew if he stayed in Harbin, he would only make it worse. Leaving, even though it killed him, was his silent act of mercy.
Maybe it was the drunken daze of war that had kept them together all those years, maybe Max was right all along, maybe she was just a substitute for Hanna, a fragile caged bird or a symbol of his pride.
Crushed, his only conciliation was that he would finally be able to shake off the giant red country, with its giant red nose, and head back to Europe where things made sense. “How different could it be?” was his last thought before gently closing the door to BaiLan’s flat.
She heard him go from the bed where she lay in a pit of sadness that she never thought existed. BaiLan would attempt to take her own life that night with a half-full bottle of benzine. But it wasn’t enough to kill her or the resilient child growing inside of her.
“Fantasia In C, "Wanderer" Adagio: Schubert”
It was raining violently the evening that BaiLan showed up on the doorstep of Dean Chen, a thick syrupy rain that fell to the ground in fist sized drops out of a purple sky. All the withered Dean saw when he opened the door was a figure slumped and soaked like a wet rat after a showdown with a broom, and then from the shadow, a small oval face with bloodshot eyes like garnets. He didn’t recognize her at first. She had gotten painfully thin in the year and a half since he’d seen her, and her hair was different. She had cut it. Cropped it into a bob that was plastered to the sides of her face. She was shivering--no wonder--he thought, she wasn’t wearing a coat, she was soaking wet, and in the lamplight, when she stepped into it, he was able to make out a series of bruises that began on her neck and traveled down the length of her back fading out of sight beneath her thin shawl. He adjusted his spectacles and squinted.
“BaiLan?” he whispered. She fell into his arms.
The Chen family were nothing if not charitable and didn’t think twice about taking Miss Bai in and nursing her back to health. They refrained from questions, making sure that above all she was comfortable, and though she was grateful for their kindness, BaiLan didn’t speak more than a few words during the first week of her stay. Mrs. Chen had to employ a host of different sneaky tactics to try and persuade her to eat, and did her best to hold her tongue as she treated the marks that covered the girl’s back.
When BaiLan was feeling stronger she mustered the courage to ask Dean Chen if he knew the whereabouts of Maestro Streng, and the ever-earnest Dean had no choice but to tell the truth, he hadn’t seen Joshua since the Japanese surrendered. Then as far as he knew, both he and Max fled Shanghai.
“All the westerners are gone. Many of them took ships to America. California, they say. Others went back to Europe. Not that I blame them. Their war is over, ours continues. Ours never ends.”
After receiving this blow, BaiLan stopped eating all together and refused to get out of bed. She was plagued by violent dreams of being chased, occasionally taking refuge in the closet or under the bed while still wrapped in her nightmare. She would wake not knowing where she was. It was disconcerting not only to BaiLan but to whoever found her, claws curled in a corner like a scared cat. She requested that all the windows and door be locked tight when she slept, as she had developed a fear of wandering away. She begged the Chen family not tell anyone that she was there. To keep her a secret while she waited for Maestro Streng to come for her.
After several weeks, Mrs. Chen began to get nervous regarding their houseguest and shared her concerns with her husband over dinner, a third of which would end up in the trash. What if BaiLan was a fugitive? What if by harboring her they risked being implicated themselves in what ever the girl had gotten herself involved in? Chen promised his wife that he would have a talk with Miss Bai as soon as she was feeling better, but as the days past she seemed only to deteriorate. They feared the worst, that she had lost the will to live, and not able to accept her blood on his hands, Dean Chen implored her.
“I care for you as if you were one of my own children,” he told her. “I watched you grow up, I saw you develop into a brilliant young musician…” And on and on like this for a long while, then he said, “I need you to tell me what happened to you so I can help.” He asked, “are you in trouble with the authorities? Have you done something you think cannot be undone? Because much can be undone, LanLan.”
She wanted to tell him. She really did. But there was too much stopping her. An aneurism of history blocking up the words, making them impossible to say. How could she tell this man, one who had known her since childhood, of the horrible indignities she had been forced to suffer as penance for her love? It was the old pride rearing its ugly head again. It was the pristine BaiLan, the virginal statue; the apple of her parent’s eye. If she told Dean Chen all that had happened, all the repugnant, deplorable things HongWei had done in the name of her salvation, she would never be able to look him in the eye again. As she saw it, BaiLan had two choices, she could die or she could leave. And since Dean Chen expressed passionate disapproval to the former, she felt she owed it to him to go on living, after all he had nearly saved her life. Only one question remained; where would she go?
“I can get you a commission in Harbin. There is a school and they are in need of a music teacher. It’s as far from Hong Kong as I could manage. I hope you like the cold.” Dean Chen forced a smile and scratched the back of his head.
“I don’t mind it.”
“You don’t know. You haven’t felt cold till you’ve experienced a Manchurian winter. It freezes the marrow in your bones.”
“It’s far way. That’s all that matters.”
“What about your parents? If they come looking for you should I tell them where you--”
BaiLan’s face lost what little color it still had.
“No. Please. No one is to know,” she sank to her knees before the Dean in a dramatic gesture of desperation.
“Please, Dean Chen, there is only one person in the world who can know where I’ve gone. Maestro Streng. Everyone else, believe me when I tell you that they no longer have my best interests in mind.”
The soft-spoken Dean placed a hand on her shoulder. She attempted to play off the flinch his touch evoked with a grin. “You have my word,” he offered a hand and lifted her to her feet. “Now, enough of this foolishness. If you want the commission there is much work to be done. We will eat, you must fatten up for the Harbin winter, and then, I have been working on a new piece by Schubert that I’d like your opinion on.”
A week later, BaiLan was on a train heading north to Beijing where she would catch her train to Harbin. The scenery that speed past her window was breathtaking, but she didn’t notice. BaiLan didn’t notice much anymore, preoccupied as she was, with memories she had painstakingly edited into a newsreel of highlights. It started with Joshua. Their walks, playing Beethoven for Madame Butterfly, the day he embraced her in that darkened hallway in HongKew, but it always ended with HongWei. Even when she tried to direct the flow of her thoughts, they would get the better of her and boil down to the bitter and crass question that began it all.
“How many times were you with him?”
He would ask her this constantly. For the first time in the car after he had abducted her and every day after. When she refused to answer he would put it to her during their atonement sessions, and eventually, with the help of a cane, he coaxed a number out of her.
She said thirteen, a lie only the naive HongWei would believe. In the end she would see the error in this. She should have told him the truth, perhaps then he would have written her off, intimidated beyond all repair. Either that or she should have convinced him she had retained her virtue, it was not an impossible thing to fake. Women had been known to do it quite convincingly with a small vile of pig’s blood carefully palmed on the wedding night. But by giving him a number that was so attainably low, made the relationship she had with Joshua seem little more than casual to HongWei. This only increased his frustration with BaiLan and his hatred of Streng who must have known of her affection towards him and used it as a way to relieve himself on thirteen different occasions. He had used her, and she was too much in love to see that. But at HongWei’s core he couldn’t totally blame her for her weak feminine heart, he still felt she was redeemable.
As for her parents, they knew nothing of what was happening under their noses, or if they did, their eyes were closed. She had embraced her father when HongWei brought her back. She begged him to let her return to Shanghai, but he only frowned. “You tried, LanLan, but it is time to resume your family duties.” Her father looked through her, they all did. Except HongWei. It was as if an arrangement had been made in her absence, one that gave him total control over her person if her were able to bring her back. As time passed, BaiLan began to see that HongWei’s reign extended over the whole family. He and his brothers patrolled that apartment as if it were one of their military posts. Constantly questioning, taking stock of who left and when.
BaiLan wasn’t allowed out of the flat unless accompanied by one of them, usually a brother, for a trip to the park or to the market to shop for the inevitable wedding. Then, once a week, HongWei would come for her and drag her, sometimes kicking and screaming, to his flat down the road, where she would be subjected to hours of torture as he racked his brain trying to come up with a suitable punishment, one that would purify her for marriage.
He give her mindless tasks to repeat in cycles of thirteen while chanting humiliating mantras of apology. He tried beating her. Thirteen strokes at a time, but it wasn’t enough. He cut her hair but he still didn’t feel vindicated. This went on for weeks until he eventually came to the only conclusion that would make things truly square in his mind.
The key was thirteen. Everything came down to that one number. It was what he saw when he looked at her. Even as he beat her he was unable to wipe the number from his mind, or erase the picture of her copulating with the ugly westerner. Thirteen stairs to their apartment, thirteen buttons on her dress as he undid them with shaking hands to reveal her white back. Sometimes the ghost of thirteen cane marks from the week prior. Nothing he did could separate her from the number. Even if she was lying, which he suspected she was, it was the number she had given him and therefore the only one he had. He wanted to erase the number to subtract it forever but since he couldn’t he decided on a system of negation. He explained it to her in detail.
“I can’t marry you like this, BaiLan,” he told her as he paced floor around the chair to which she clung, “I have gone over it in my mind many times but it is no good. You have put things out of balance, BaiLan. By letting that violinist violate you, you have made it impossible for me to ever accept you as a wife.”
“I don’t want to be your wife,” BaiLan said through gritted teeth, but HongWei had stopped listening to her months ago, she was hardly in the room. It was only him and his blinding insecurity.
“We must even the score, BaiLan. Only then will I be able to respect you.”
“I don’t want your respect.”
“It will be like,” he searched for the word, “a ritual. I don’t intend to look at you when I do it. I won’t touch you with my hands. It will be a loveless act, like it was for your beloved Maestro. Then, when we are even, we shall be married and I will embrace you as a wife. On that day we will both know what it really means to love.”
“I will never love you.”
This HongWei heard and turned on her like a tiger. “You only say that because you are still under his spell. All the more reason why what I suggest is necessary.”
That was how it began. A systematic series of rapes to make things even in the eyes of her intended. HongWei had it figured to the letter. His brothers would be present as witnesses and to restrain his lovely fiancée if she was in a struggling mood. It would be quick and clean--always the former, seldom the latter--as BaiLan fought him every time.
It wasn’t so much the act itself, which was less horrible than it was unpleasant, nor was it the humiliation of having his leering brothers there, pretending to look away as they held down her arms, while he did his pathetic business below the folds of her dress. No, the worst part about it was that it was working exactly the way HongWei had planned. Every time he forced himself on her, he would force out a little of the memory she had of Joshua, till an act that had once been only a source of good memories became a tainted with violence and revenge.
It wasn’t long before HongWei’s formality began to melt in the heat of his passion. Soon he had started creeping into her bedroom at night and pinning her down, breathing heavily into her ear. She would have screamed, but she knew she would not survive the shame that would come if her parents were to find out. His precious number thirteen came and went, as did the ritualistic aspect of the assaults as he began to come to her daily getting lost in obsessive protestations. He couldn’t stop himself, he said. He thought about her constantly it was affecting his work. He said he loved her, he needed to be near her, inside her, now, always, again. He wanted to make love to her, to caress her, to kiss her, to be naked with her, and asked if she felt it too. How could she not?
It was his love more than all the rest of it that pushed BaiLan to her breaking point. Even if it meant loosing her family, she could not endure it and its sticky realities any longer.
She made her escape during a shopping trip with the brothers, slipping out of a store while their backs were turned. She had no money, no clothes except the ones on her back, but she ran. She ran and didn’t look back till she made it to Shanghai, half-expecting to see HongWei at her heels when she finally turned to check for him that rainy night on Dean Chen’s porch, the sky the color of a rotten plum or a black eye.
Harbin is a city of unparalleled beauty in every season but it is in winter that she really comes into her own. Like a beautiful girl who stays silent until the cold descends, then opens her mouth to sings like an angel. Harbin’s angels were carved out of ice, as was everything else during the winter months. An entire parallel city built to rival the existing non-transparent one. It sparkled into existence as soon as the first frost descended, block-by-block, angel-by-angel, flower-by-flower and bird-by-bird. By whatever the ice-sculptors, professional and non-professional could dream up.
She boasted ice archways and ice columns thirty feet high, ice alters, ice gardens, ice rinks, ice animals, ice children, ice to eat flavored with colored sugar. Ice hotels with ice beds and ice furniture. Ice restaurants with cold food served on plates made of ice. Ice forests, ice fortresses, and ice mazes lit in a kaleidoscope of colors. Irreverent candleholders made of ice clung to brave ice walls—oh, how they tempted fate!
It was this sensory feast that greeted Joshua in the winter of ’49 when he first set foot in the grand northern city. It was such a shocking change from the warm, wet mud and saturated greenery of Taiwan that it shredded his senses to the point of euphoria.
The frost settled in his beard and he loosened the strings on both The Lion and his ehru to prevent stress. When he lost his footing and slipped, for the first time of many slips to follow, he broke out into a great rolling laugh, one that prompted children in red caps and ice skates to come rescue him as if they were part of some obscure branch of the Red Cross reserved for ice festivals of inordinate size.
It was a winter wonderland like no other and it pleased him. To be bundled against the cold made him feel alive, sharp, and energized. He who had grown used to the weight of humidity, the lethargy of heat, the oppression of sunlight, it felt as if he had been set free, like a spark leaping gleefully from a fire. He was excited too, for he was told that this was the city where he would find BaiLan.
When Joshua showed up on the steps of the Chen house it was a scene comically similar to the one two years earlier that had revealed BaiLan. It was raining, great hulking drops against a gray and crimson sky, and Joshua was wet. He didn’t have more than a threadbare coat covering him and he looked thin. Still, it didn’t take Dean Chen a minute to realize it was him, Joshua would forever stand out against any Chinese backdrop like a giraffe attempting to blend in with heard of horses.
“We had very nearly given up on you,” the old man said, cleaning his spectacles. Then he smiled and welcomed Joshua in. Mrs. Chen cooked and over dinner he told them his story. They were truly amazed and saddened by it for it seemed the young man had been through so much in his short life. They knew, you see, more about the atrocities coming to light in Europe than Joshua did having been on the island for two years. They knew what had happened to his wife and had nothing good to report about BaiLan. Their end of the tale was not easy to relate since they didn’t want to add to his burden with another series of unanswered questions, still they had honored BaiLan with the truth as they knew it and would do the same for Maestro Streng. In the end he was grateful. They knew where she was, just as he suspected they would.
Unlike BaiLan, Joshua didn’t stay on at the Chen’s for very long. He was out the door the following day with his nose pointed northward in search of BaiLan and a way out of China with her on his arm. He decided that they had suffered enough. Unfortunately it was not a decision he was qualified to make. He knew this, but hoped for the best, as if positive thought could somehow influence fate.
For the record, it cannot.
It didn’t take him long to find her. He slipped and slid his way to the school where he was told she worked and walked right in. It was Sunday, but something told him that he would find her there.
BaiLan had always been obsessive when it came to practicing. He recalled a story she had told him about her childhood. A fantasy of waking up in a room that had in it nothing but her cello and piles upon piles of sheet music. If she broke a string or got hungry, the things she needed would be slipped to her through a small opening in the wall, but beyond that it was to be pure solitude. She wanted to be imprisoned with her instrument, to perfect every piece of music ever written for the cello, and have all the time in the world to do it.
On that snowy day--it had started to snow as Joshua made his way to the school--BaiLan was not engaged in the cello but gazing out of the window as one of her pupils practiced his Mozart at the piano.
Reflected in her eyes flakes as big as feathers landed softly on the ice menagerie her students had been raising since late November. She had her arms crossed against her chest and she wore a red sweater, the only color in the room. Her hair was short which made the viewing of her shoulders infinitely less complicated. When the boy came to the end of his piece, BaiLan whispered, “Wieder.”
“I’m sorry, teacher?” the child asked, having heard but not understood his mistress.
“Again,” Joshua instructed from the doorway where he had been standing.
BaiLan turned as if the word was a bullet fired from the past into her heart. Moving so quickly that she nearly left her shoes behind her, she ran to him and tackled his chest with the force of a giant magnet or a thousand speeding flowers.
“Mien Blume,” He whispered.
She said nothing, she couldn’t, she only held him and wept.
The student at the piano watched the scene with a slack jaw till Joshua instructed him to play his piece again. And play it he did, three times before BaiLan released her grip. When she released him she wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t vanish into a cloud of steam or even worse end up being the janitor. She looked into Joshua’s face with wonder as if doing so, would heal her every wound.
BaiLan dismissed her pupil without breaking her gaze and asked the question that had been part of her for over three years.
“Where have you been?”
That afternoon the reunited lovers walked slowly through the ice city arm in arm. It had been so long since their walks in Shanghai but they fell into step together as if perhaps only a few days had passed. For a long while they were silent, watching a gaggle of children in red scarves make figure eights around an ice statue of Chairman Mao wearing its own, slightly larger, red scarf made form paper. Then finally, Joshua spoke.
“Can you forgive me, LanLan?”
She answered his question with one of her own.
“Can you forgive me?”
“For what? I’m the one who failed you.”
“You didn’t fail me. You’re here. And I don’t care what kept you. I am certain that you got here as soon as was humanly possible.”
Joshua thought of his Taiwanese meditation sessions and his heart sizzled with guilt. He could have gotten to her sooner if he tried, but now was not the time to be confessing such things, he would keep it from her to spare her feelings, for wasn’t he happy just to be with her now?
“I got here as soon as I could,” he told her, for anything else would have been barbaric.
As they walked on further through the ice city, BaiLan opened up like a clam upon contact with boiling water. She told him about her school, about her students--some of who showed real promise, she shared everything that was positive and beautiful about her life, leaving out the past, leaving out HongWei. Joshua wasn’t the only one concerned with sparing feelings. But for BaiLan it went even deeper than that. She had spent the past two years trying to forget what had happened to her, if it remained unspoken it remained powerless. She had no intention of ever telling Joshua, or anyone about HongWei. She would focus only on the good.
Soon they came upon BaiLan’s favorite attraction, The Crystal Maze. She had been through it several times already, but promised Joshua that he could decide on all the turns without any help from her. They bought two tickets from the old man who hurried them along.
“No dilly-dallying, I want to go home.” BaiLan lowered the fur-collar of her coat to smile at him, and he waved a finger of recognition. “You know this maze, make it quick.”
She insisted on going through in her ice skates, which had Joshua enthralled. Citizens of Harbin all owned ice skates. Retractable ones were installed at birth, laying in wait during the useless summer months like un-switched switchblades, till the ice came to release their trigger and set their shiny blades free. BaiLan was the perfect candidate for the things, long limbed and graceful. Joshua shuffled along behind her clinging to the ice wall like a toddler moments before taking his first steps and handicapped as he was, he too felt set free. The cold, the dizzying cold, it made his body heat up like a baked potato inside of his coat, while his extremities froze, his cheeks burned and his head throbbed. He grabbed his swan and pinned her back to the icy wall.
“I love it here, it makes me feel alive.” Then he reached into the folds of her coat and ran his hands up the small of her back to where her skirt ended and her red sweater began. His cold hands made contact with her baked potato skin, which was most certainly of the sweet or fingerling variety, and she let out a high-pitched cry that cut Joshua to the loins.
Suddenly the prospect of making love to her there, on the ice seemed like the best idea anyone had ever had. The glorious heat combined with the freezing cold would be an experiment in extremity he wasn’t willing to pass up, so he kissed her to smother her cries, and with their mouths joined he threw off his coat and let it fall to the ground.
He searched for more flesh by way of the zipper that held up her skirt and let it fall to her knees. But his present would not be opened so easily. There were her wool stockings to contend with, which he decided to will off of her, applying pressure skillfully to key areas above them till they magically came down on their own. A moment later after a tinkling of icy fingers worked at his worn belt buckle he felt himself exposed to the elements--first relief, then cold, then with a gentle push, the fiery inferno of Hades itself wrapping around him and holding on for dear life.
It was in this conjoined manner that they fell to the ice, he couldn’t secure the footing to do to her what was so direly necessary by that point with out slipping comically away like a pornographic Charlie Chaplin, so they relocated to the ice each in turn experiencing the simultaneously wicked and soothing feeling of it burning their bare skin.
Everything was hot, even the ice, which had begun to melt beneath them till their bodies sloshes in a tepid wading pool. With the moisture making him seasick, and her tears burning his lips, the current inside of him broke and crashed into her like a sub-marine lava flow. Three years were the words that appeared above the scale, repeating with no rest between them. Three years, as he pressed into her, giving her everything he had, most of which collected in the oyster shell they had left in the ice, the concave hole of love in which she sat, legs spread in the collecting murk. It seemed yellow against the pristine white of the snow, the way the teeth of a Geisha do when she is in the white face of her trade. He pictured it re-freezing when they had long gone. His essence left behind to be trod and skated upon by winter revelers, till spring of course when his children would go to their graves in mud.
He stayed inside of her until it became painful and then stayed longer. It was this quietly chaotic moment that she usually reserved for her own climax. On the mattress in Shanghai she had explained that his willingness to suffer was what put her over the edge, she had said it in jest, but there was no getting past its truth. That day he intended to suffer inside of her until his balls froze.
But there was no sound from BaiLan. No moans as her hips manipulated his recent gift of Geisha teeth tinted, illuminated lubrication. She was stone, and her eyes teared, not from the cold as his did, but from some internal source. They didn’t meet his either. Her head was turned and cast down. Everything about her body language pulled away from him until he had no choice but to pull away from her.
“LanLan, what’s wrong?” Her skin began to turn blue. “Besides the obvious, LanLan?” He tried to laugh as he used his coat to dry her, as he pulled her stockings back up around her doll’s hips, as he refastened her skirt and closed her coat all of this with his own pants still around his knees. He made a crass joke about frozen bratwurst. But she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Did I hurt you? LanLan tell me what’s wrong.”
Eventually, she blubbered an excuse about being overwhelmed with emotion, and part of her believed it too. Part of her believed that HongWei had nothing to do with the equation. But as the days past, tension grew between the newly reunited couple, so much so, that it had Joshua questioning his northward journey altogether.
First off, she wouldn’t let him touch her; even handholding had her pulling away. She was far more impatient than he remembered and seemed to be easily irritated by trivial things, like the state of the bathroom or a dirty bowl left out overnight. She had all but quit the cello; she didn’t even have one in her home--a tiny pair of rooms allocated to her by the school. And that was a whole other problem. She was breaking the rules by allowing Joshua to stay with her. Teachers weren’t allowed to have long-term houseguests as it was considered to be morally questionable by the powers that be. This was a source of constant worry for BaiLan, who would clam up and not speak when Joshua suggested that they simply find other lodging, or even better, leave China. Move to Europe, America, Argentina, anywhere but there.
He wanted to conduct again, to compose, to travel, and her ludicrous response to this was that she had to think of her students. It’s not that Joshua didn’t understand, but really, they had been through so much. It was almost as if she were trying to drive him away on purpose.
The night Joshua left, they had had a terrible fight. The headmaster of the school found out he’d living in her quarters and gave them a three-day ultimatum. BaiLan’s brilliant suggestion was that Joshua find his own lodging nearby and visit with her from time to time. Her words delivered a sting he could not recover from.
“Things have changed,” she said, then closed her bedroom door and wept the entire night away.
Joshua listened for several hours. He wondered what she was crying about? After all, she was the one ending it. Women do that, or so he had heard. Remove the love and there is still emotion, still the pain of loss, still an overwhelming sense of guilt at being the one bringing down the axe, so in essence, she was crying for herself and he knew if he stayed in Harbin, he would only make it worse. Leaving, even though it killed him, was his silent act of mercy.
Maybe it was the drunken daze of war that had kept them together all those years, maybe Max was right all along, maybe she was just a substitute for Hanna, a fragile caged bird or a symbol of his pride.
Crushed, his only conciliation was that he would finally be able to shake off the giant red country, with its giant red nose, and head back to Europe where things made sense. “How different could it be?” was his last thought before gently closing the door to BaiLan’s flat.
She heard him go from the bed where she lay in a pit of sadness that she never thought existed. BaiLan would attempt to take her own life that night with a half-full bottle of benzine. But it wasn’t enough to kill her or the resilient child growing inside of her.
Chapter 24
24.
“Symphonie No. 1 In F Minor, Op 10, I. Allegretto. Allegro Non Troppo: Shostakovich”
It wasn’t until the winter of ’46 that Joshua was able to locate the Hong Kong residence of the Bai family. It was a flat less than half the size of their Shanghai home and the deed was in the name of Hong. It was only by chance that he thought to check, and by a miracle that he was able to locate the correct Hong, as one can imagine there were quite a few families by that name in the city of Hong Kong.
A miracle, he thought. But it was not a miracle. It was actually the very worst of luck. And he would have two years to think about it once the week was up, but on the balmy morning that brought him to the corner building with the gothic windows, he felt as if he had won the ring toss. He was moments away from finding out where LanLan was after almost a year of separation.
Joshua himself had been in Hong Kong for four months, which compared to Shanghai, was a virtual paradise; a beautiful coastal city, sub-tropical, with palm trees, pleasing architecture and a mountain range for a backdrop. With a recommendation from Dean Chen it wasn’t hard to get work, especially now that his Mandarin was passable.
It was well beneath him, but he took a job giving music lessons to wealthy housewives. Most of them weren’t even interested in playing, preferring to drink hard liquors mixed with exotic fruit juices and talk about how mundane their lives had become; it paid very well.
During his down time, he made it his job to troll the hall of records for clues, to garner what information he could from the business section of the papers and from the streets that he wandered aimlessly in hopes of getting lucky. Every week he sent out fifteen letters to families with the name Bai and when nothing came of it, he began working on name Hong.
As if by magic, he received a letter back after the very first mailing. It read, “Maestro Streng, How very nice to hear that you are alive and in good health. BaiLan will also be glad to hear this as she has much respect and admiration for you, her teacher. She is very busy at the moment planning her wedding so I am afraid she will not be able to receive you personally. If you would like to pay your respects to her parents, we are willing to receive you for tea this coming Saturday at 2pm. Signed, Mr. Bai.”
Joshua marked the date. Even if they wouldn’t let him see her, there was no way he intended to miss out on the chance to pay his respects. He wanted to hear their lies, from their mouths, in order to prove what he suspected all along, that she had not gone to Hong Kong of her own free will but had been taken there against it.
He brought flowers to the building with the pale yellow paint and marble stairs, and as he climbed them, he swore he heard the distant sounds of a cello being played beyond the walls in one of the apartments, probably hers. He had hardly considered that she would be there, locked away in a chamber, down a hall, the realization put a spring in his step, a spring where there should have been caution. Still, nobody expects an ambush.
“Maestro Streng, come in.”
Mr. Bai answered the door with a stern face and led Joshua into a bright cheerful living room with a European feel to it. Much of Hong Kong reminded him of Europe, what disturbed him, if only at first, then again after the boot dropped, was the familiar face of HongWei sitting in the corner wearing the uniform and mustache of General Chang Kai-Shek.
“Good day, Streng,” HongWei said without getting up. He spoke in a manner that seemed deliberately intimidating and Joshua knew immediately that he was the one who had taken BaiLan from Shanghai. “So, are you going to tell me where she is, or do I have to get it out of you myself?”
“I’m sorry?” Joshua was honestly confused by this remark. He sat down and met eyes with HongWei who placed his right hand lightly on his pistol releasing the snap that kept it safe in its holster.
“Please, Streng, do not try my patience.”
So Joshua didn’t, in his best Mandarin, he explained to HongWei that he had come to see BaiLan.
“If she were with me what business would I have here? What kind of fool would take her then come back just to say hello?”
HongWei though about this for a good long while before coming to a most absurd conclusion. “You are here to taunt me. You want me to know that it is you who took her as revenge for when I took her from you!”
He wanted to tell him how ridiculous this was, but the gun in his face convinced him otherwise.
“Go to my flat, I promise you won’t find her there,” Joshua said as steadily as possible.
“You have her hidden!”
“I don’t.”
“You have her hidden and you are keeping her from me! Where is she?” He was red in the face. This must have been a new wound. He wondered how long it had been since BaiLan had fled, it might even have been the previous night. He might have missed her by less than a day.
“I don’t have her, HongWei. She must have ran away.”
“Back to Shanghai?”
“She might have.”
“Nonsense! Tell me where you are hiding her!” His screams had all four parents hovering around the door but not one made a move to stop him.
“I’m not hiding her, you are out of your mind.”
HongWei aimed his pistol between Joshua’s eyes, “If you won’t tell me where she is, then to hell with both of you.” And with a deafening thud, the lights went out.
The term “Shanghaied” refers to being placed on a ship without ones knowledge or consent. And it was on a ship that Joshua awoke surrounded on all sides by confusion. He hadn’t been shot, which was a relief, merely knocked out, rushed to harbor, and thrown on a boat.
After regaining what was left of his senses, he deducted that the ship he was on was headed for Taiwan. It didn’t take him long to figure out two things, one being that it was all HongWei’s doing, and two, that his timing had been impeccably ill fated. If his letter had not reached the Hong-Bai household for say, another week, HongWei would have been long gone without his Shanghaied guest.
He also learned that he was not the only one on the boat there against their will. Chang Kai-Shek’s army was losing power rapidly with the Communists taking control of the country from the top down and it was only a matter of time before they pushed the Nationalists out completely. Enrollment in the army was low, after a twenty-two-year war, this was to be expected, and the Nationalists had been reduced to forced recruitment.
Most of the inhabitants of the hull were young boys, some barely through puberty, and others were old, grandfather types who were past their fighting prime. He wasn’t the only westerner either. A few of the men looked Arabic, there was a black, and one man was as blonde as Max, though he seemed off somehow, like he had been picked up from a madhouse, for he was talking to himself and the wall intermittently. Was the army so desperate that they were liberating prisons and asylums?
Joshua had been bested. He thought of his small room in Hong Kong and his appointment with Mrs. Wong set for that coming Monday. What would she do when he didn’t show up? Would she figure out what happened? Or would she assume that he had simply moved on? He was dumbstruck with a throbbing head. He could hardly process what was happening to him, the only flicker of hope was in the fact that he had left the Lion with her, both so she could practice, and because there had been a series of break-ins in his building and he was afraid it would be stolen while he was out roaming those ever pleasant streets looking for BaiLan.
When he didn’t return for it she would know something had happened. She liked him, maybe she could help. But as he looked around the rusty hull and felt the ship cutting quickly through the sea below, his hope began to fade. Joshua the warrior wasn’t really a warrior, he wasn’t a soldier; he was a romantic with a sensitive heart. He couldn’t fight, let alone kill a fly. He had to find HongWei, to reason with him. This could not be his fate.
The ship docked after what felt like an eternity, but the passengers were not to be disembarked for hours. None had eaten and the hull had begun to smell like a barn. It was night when they were finally let out at the port of Sanchung and informed that they were property of Chen Yi, (Chang Kai-Shek’s man in charge) until instructed otherwise. Then they were corralled onto military trucks and driven to Taipei, each truck with its own armed guard.
As the group was being split up, Joshua searched the perimeter for HongWei, but when he found him, couldn’t get close. Somehow, the vexed Romeo had managed to weasel his way to a position of power, one that allowed him to ride in the long black car that headed up their caravan.
The trip to Taipei only gave the now exhausted men more time for reflection. To Joshua, some of them seemed resigned to their fate. An older Chinese man who liked to talk, tried to reassure some of the youngsters that being forced to fight was better than giving in to the Communists. Joshua was inclined to agree. But what upset him was that this wasn’t his war. He had just survived his war. The last thing he needed was another one, one he hardly understood. He felt trapped in a nightmare and for the first time since he left its boarders, he longed for the familiar streets of Shanghai. This thought caused him to laugh out loud, which in turn, provoked a nasty thump from the skittish guard sitting to his right.
The trucks pulled into the city of Taipei at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark. From what he could make out through the break in the flap, they had passed through a gate and come to rest in a large open space. When the trucks stopped, the men were hurried out and put into lines under massive floodlights. They stood silently for approximately thirty minutes before a new group of men approached.
One of them, highly decorated, with a weathered face, said, loudly to HongWei and his associates, “This is all you bring me? They look like a bunch of sick dogs!” Joshua would find out later that this man was Chen Yi. “Get them in,” he yelled and the soldiers directed the ramshackle group towards a compound of barracks.
As he turned to fall in with the group, Joshua heard his name.
“Streng,” it was HongWei.
Joshua approached the loan soldier.
“Walk with me.”
HongWei lead Joshua out of the glaring floodlights and into the shadows. They walked towards the gate to a deserted spot. The reality of what HongWei might be about to do was settling into Joshua’s gut like food poisoning. He watched as the young man’s hand flinched in the vicinity of his pistol.
“I don’t know where she is, HongWei,” he ventured. “What kind of man would I be to lie to you now? I’d be a fool. You have won. I don’t know--”
HongWei held up a twitching finger to silence him. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, right? You say I have won, but she loves you, so, really…” He trailed off. Joshua almost pitied him.
“I’m no soldier, HongWei. Send me back.”
HongWei smiled. “A soldier? You? You would be a detriment to our cause. You are not like the rest of us. You don’t need to fight. You are something special. That’s why LanLan loves you. That is also why you must suffer.”
He didn’t go for his gun as Joshua expected, instead he took out a key and opened the gate leading out of the compound.
“Let’s see how you do in Taipei with no money, no papers and no violin. Get out of my sight.”
On that first backwards night in Taipei, Joshua couldn’t stop thinking of something Hanna had said on the night they first met. She was stunning and aloof and he was being flippant and self-deprecating, a foolproof seduction technique that wasn’t working on her. He had said something along the lines of, “I am inches away from the poor house, Hanna. I can hardly feed myself.” This was a lie, of course, Joshua was at the height of his early career. In fact they were at a party celebrating the Berlin premier of a work by a young Russian composer by the name of Dimitri Shostakovich. Joshua’s friend and mentor Bruno Walter had guest conducted his First Symphony to rave reviews. Joshua had played first violin and the after party was his first experience with copious amounts of vodka. Hanna wasn’t having any of it.
“As long as there are people in the world who feel things, a good musician will never go hungry,” she replied. Then, in a breeze of jasmine flower, she turned to converse with the shy, be speckled, Russian, for he knew how to hold his liquor.
It was to this statement that he hung as he negotiated his way through the colorful streets in search of an opportunity. He sought a small hole in the canvas, anything that would set things back to what he had trained himself to consider normal—and he was already stretched far past his breaking point.
The reception that awaited him on the busy streets of Taipei was remarkable. If Joshua was considered somewhat eye catching in Shanghai, here on the island he was a virtual enigma. Much of the local population hadn’t ever seen a westerner before, let alone one of Joshua’s size. This helped his plight—eventually--when a group of children, who had nicknamed him Ojisan, began bringing offerings to the alleyway where he had situated himself. But no momentum was gained.
Life in Taiwan was nonexistent for someone like Joshua. HongWei had picked exactly the right method of torture, for without music, he was almost totally impotent. If there was a violin on the island, he never came across it and after months of near starvation and nomadic wandering, odd jobs and begging, he decided that it was time to approach the ugly situation from a different angle.
The Erhu is a two-stringed instrument most commonly known as the Chinese violin. It is played sitting down, placed on top of the left thigh. Joshua first came in contact with them in the opera houses of Shanghai, but he didn’t give the erhu much credit. It only has two strings. What could be done with two strings—a bit, of course--but in comparison to the violin? He was someone who looked down on the ukulele--it was his snobbery that closed his ears back then and desperation that re-opened them now.
He caught sight of one on a street in Hsinchu and befriended the player, an elderly gentleman, whose name was Liu. Joshua would watch Liu play every morning till curiosity got the better of the man and he asked Joshua what it was about his playing that captivated him so.
“You may not know it, sir,” Joshua said, “but you are my first erhu teacher.” To prove this, Joshua convinced Liu to let him have a turn on the instrument and when he displayed a shocking amount of proficiency, “just from listening,” he said, the old man was impressed and invited Joshua for tea in his home, a humble, yet comfortable structure on the outskirts of town.
Not only was Liu a master of the erhu, he was also a craftsman of many forms of traditional Chinese string instruments. His house was his workshop and there was much to be done. So he worked, cross-legged on the floor before the fire, sanding the sound box of what would someday be a huquin, while Joshua told his story.
The old man, who was never big on words, listened and sanded, never taking his eyes off his work. When Joshua finished, he put down his sanding cloth and looked him long in the eyes. When he seemed satisfied, he got up and opened a cabinet beneath one of his workbenches.
“I bought this on the mainland. Many years ago. I could sell it to you, I suppose.”
It was wrapped in blue silk, the bow separately. A pretty little violin, smaller than the Lion--but what right did he have to be choosey? It reminded him of the one he played for General Kuboto, dainty, feminine, of Austrian make.
“May I?” He tuned while Liu went about his business, then played a melody, one by the Russian who he had been thinking about lately in the background of his memory. He was there with them all in that parlor drinking vodka, as the rain fell outside, as a goat trudged through the Taiwanese mud. He had lived too may lives, it was only a matter of time till they began to converge, till he no longer knew the past from the present, reality from dreams.
“You play it well, but I don’t know what you plan to do with it here. If you wish to buy your way back to the mainland, you will learn the erhu.”
Liu liked Joshua and offered him a sort of apprenticeship. He could live with him--there was a loft that didn’t get used. Liu’s hip was bad and he didn’t like the climb. Once he had worked off his first erhu, he could keep whatever money he made busking. The goal being to raise enough money to go back to the mainland and resume his search.
His days with Liu were monastic; routine like he had never know. Something about the beautiful island, named Formosa by the Portuguese, encouraged forgetting. It was his old image of China, the one he pictured on the Conte Camano--before he knew the realities of life in Shanghai--misty and otherworldly.
With every passing month he felt himself drifting further and further away. He played the erhu almost exclusively, the violin didn’t seem to make sense anymore. It was a European instrument, and had little effect on the gods that dwelled in the misty mountains of Taiwan. He managed to remain blissfully unaware of the changing political climate. The massacres in the Taipei, the corruption of the Chinese, it was all on the peripheral. He thought of BaiLan often, everyday, but he was loosing his urgency, as if island life had put him under a spell.
By 1949 he was practically mute, playing on the street in the morning and taking long constitutionals in the afternoons, listening to the wind, looking neither backwards or forwards. He had taken to meditating, to cooking for himself and Liu. He was studying the teachings of Buddha.
Then, in the spring, when the monsoons had died down, Liu came to him. He climbed the ladder into the loft, and sat beside Joshua early one morning and waited silently for him to wake. There was a beautiful sunrise that morning, they watched it together through the small window that faced the mountains. Liu told Joshua that he had saved more then enough money to get back to Hong Kong and though he would be sad to see him go, it was time for him to return to his life and his continue his journey. He gave him the erhu that Joshua had thoroughly mastered by that point, as well as the little violin--in case he was unable to locate his. Liu didn’t say much more than that. He didn’t make any detailed arguments, he simply said, “go,” and with this one word, broke Joshua’s two-year spell. He was released.
Once he shook of the Taiwan haze, he found himself reenergized and all he could think about was seeing BaiLan again. But how? His original plan was to go back to Hong Kong and resume his search there, but he questioned this. His gut told him he would find nothing.
He would go back to Hong Kong briefly, but only to retrieve his Lion. In a stroke of fortune, Mrs. Wong still had it and gladly accepted the trade for Liu’s violin. After that, he knew there was only one place left to go, and one person who would know the whereabouts of BaiLan. The person was Dean Chen and the place was Shanghai.
“Symphonie No. 1 In F Minor, Op 10, I. Allegretto. Allegro Non Troppo: Shostakovich”
It wasn’t until the winter of ’46 that Joshua was able to locate the Hong Kong residence of the Bai family. It was a flat less than half the size of their Shanghai home and the deed was in the name of Hong. It was only by chance that he thought to check, and by a miracle that he was able to locate the correct Hong, as one can imagine there were quite a few families by that name in the city of Hong Kong.
A miracle, he thought. But it was not a miracle. It was actually the very worst of luck. And he would have two years to think about it once the week was up, but on the balmy morning that brought him to the corner building with the gothic windows, he felt as if he had won the ring toss. He was moments away from finding out where LanLan was after almost a year of separation.
Joshua himself had been in Hong Kong for four months, which compared to Shanghai, was a virtual paradise; a beautiful coastal city, sub-tropical, with palm trees, pleasing architecture and a mountain range for a backdrop. With a recommendation from Dean Chen it wasn’t hard to get work, especially now that his Mandarin was passable.
It was well beneath him, but he took a job giving music lessons to wealthy housewives. Most of them weren’t even interested in playing, preferring to drink hard liquors mixed with exotic fruit juices and talk about how mundane their lives had become; it paid very well.
During his down time, he made it his job to troll the hall of records for clues, to garner what information he could from the business section of the papers and from the streets that he wandered aimlessly in hopes of getting lucky. Every week he sent out fifteen letters to families with the name Bai and when nothing came of it, he began working on name Hong.
As if by magic, he received a letter back after the very first mailing. It read, “Maestro Streng, How very nice to hear that you are alive and in good health. BaiLan will also be glad to hear this as she has much respect and admiration for you, her teacher. She is very busy at the moment planning her wedding so I am afraid she will not be able to receive you personally. If you would like to pay your respects to her parents, we are willing to receive you for tea this coming Saturday at 2pm. Signed, Mr. Bai.”
Joshua marked the date. Even if they wouldn’t let him see her, there was no way he intended to miss out on the chance to pay his respects. He wanted to hear their lies, from their mouths, in order to prove what he suspected all along, that she had not gone to Hong Kong of her own free will but had been taken there against it.
He brought flowers to the building with the pale yellow paint and marble stairs, and as he climbed them, he swore he heard the distant sounds of a cello being played beyond the walls in one of the apartments, probably hers. He had hardly considered that she would be there, locked away in a chamber, down a hall, the realization put a spring in his step, a spring where there should have been caution. Still, nobody expects an ambush.
“Maestro Streng, come in.”
Mr. Bai answered the door with a stern face and led Joshua into a bright cheerful living room with a European feel to it. Much of Hong Kong reminded him of Europe, what disturbed him, if only at first, then again after the boot dropped, was the familiar face of HongWei sitting in the corner wearing the uniform and mustache of General Chang Kai-Shek.
“Good day, Streng,” HongWei said without getting up. He spoke in a manner that seemed deliberately intimidating and Joshua knew immediately that he was the one who had taken BaiLan from Shanghai. “So, are you going to tell me where she is, or do I have to get it out of you myself?”
“I’m sorry?” Joshua was honestly confused by this remark. He sat down and met eyes with HongWei who placed his right hand lightly on his pistol releasing the snap that kept it safe in its holster.
“Please, Streng, do not try my patience.”
So Joshua didn’t, in his best Mandarin, he explained to HongWei that he had come to see BaiLan.
“If she were with me what business would I have here? What kind of fool would take her then come back just to say hello?”
HongWei though about this for a good long while before coming to a most absurd conclusion. “You are here to taunt me. You want me to know that it is you who took her as revenge for when I took her from you!”
He wanted to tell him how ridiculous this was, but the gun in his face convinced him otherwise.
“Go to my flat, I promise you won’t find her there,” Joshua said as steadily as possible.
“You have her hidden!”
“I don’t.”
“You have her hidden and you are keeping her from me! Where is she?” He was red in the face. This must have been a new wound. He wondered how long it had been since BaiLan had fled, it might even have been the previous night. He might have missed her by less than a day.
“I don’t have her, HongWei. She must have ran away.”
“Back to Shanghai?”
“She might have.”
“Nonsense! Tell me where you are hiding her!” His screams had all four parents hovering around the door but not one made a move to stop him.
“I’m not hiding her, you are out of your mind.”
HongWei aimed his pistol between Joshua’s eyes, “If you won’t tell me where she is, then to hell with both of you.” And with a deafening thud, the lights went out.
The term “Shanghaied” refers to being placed on a ship without ones knowledge or consent. And it was on a ship that Joshua awoke surrounded on all sides by confusion. He hadn’t been shot, which was a relief, merely knocked out, rushed to harbor, and thrown on a boat.
After regaining what was left of his senses, he deducted that the ship he was on was headed for Taiwan. It didn’t take him long to figure out two things, one being that it was all HongWei’s doing, and two, that his timing had been impeccably ill fated. If his letter had not reached the Hong-Bai household for say, another week, HongWei would have been long gone without his Shanghaied guest.
He also learned that he was not the only one on the boat there against their will. Chang Kai-Shek’s army was losing power rapidly with the Communists taking control of the country from the top down and it was only a matter of time before they pushed the Nationalists out completely. Enrollment in the army was low, after a twenty-two-year war, this was to be expected, and the Nationalists had been reduced to forced recruitment.
Most of the inhabitants of the hull were young boys, some barely through puberty, and others were old, grandfather types who were past their fighting prime. He wasn’t the only westerner either. A few of the men looked Arabic, there was a black, and one man was as blonde as Max, though he seemed off somehow, like he had been picked up from a madhouse, for he was talking to himself and the wall intermittently. Was the army so desperate that they were liberating prisons and asylums?
Joshua had been bested. He thought of his small room in Hong Kong and his appointment with Mrs. Wong set for that coming Monday. What would she do when he didn’t show up? Would she figure out what happened? Or would she assume that he had simply moved on? He was dumbstruck with a throbbing head. He could hardly process what was happening to him, the only flicker of hope was in the fact that he had left the Lion with her, both so she could practice, and because there had been a series of break-ins in his building and he was afraid it would be stolen while he was out roaming those ever pleasant streets looking for BaiLan.
When he didn’t return for it she would know something had happened. She liked him, maybe she could help. But as he looked around the rusty hull and felt the ship cutting quickly through the sea below, his hope began to fade. Joshua the warrior wasn’t really a warrior, he wasn’t a soldier; he was a romantic with a sensitive heart. He couldn’t fight, let alone kill a fly. He had to find HongWei, to reason with him. This could not be his fate.
The ship docked after what felt like an eternity, but the passengers were not to be disembarked for hours. None had eaten and the hull had begun to smell like a barn. It was night when they were finally let out at the port of Sanchung and informed that they were property of Chen Yi, (Chang Kai-Shek’s man in charge) until instructed otherwise. Then they were corralled onto military trucks and driven to Taipei, each truck with its own armed guard.
As the group was being split up, Joshua searched the perimeter for HongWei, but when he found him, couldn’t get close. Somehow, the vexed Romeo had managed to weasel his way to a position of power, one that allowed him to ride in the long black car that headed up their caravan.
The trip to Taipei only gave the now exhausted men more time for reflection. To Joshua, some of them seemed resigned to their fate. An older Chinese man who liked to talk, tried to reassure some of the youngsters that being forced to fight was better than giving in to the Communists. Joshua was inclined to agree. But what upset him was that this wasn’t his war. He had just survived his war. The last thing he needed was another one, one he hardly understood. He felt trapped in a nightmare and for the first time since he left its boarders, he longed for the familiar streets of Shanghai. This thought caused him to laugh out loud, which in turn, provoked a nasty thump from the skittish guard sitting to his right.
The trucks pulled into the city of Taipei at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark. From what he could make out through the break in the flap, they had passed through a gate and come to rest in a large open space. When the trucks stopped, the men were hurried out and put into lines under massive floodlights. They stood silently for approximately thirty minutes before a new group of men approached.
One of them, highly decorated, with a weathered face, said, loudly to HongWei and his associates, “This is all you bring me? They look like a bunch of sick dogs!” Joshua would find out later that this man was Chen Yi. “Get them in,” he yelled and the soldiers directed the ramshackle group towards a compound of barracks.
As he turned to fall in with the group, Joshua heard his name.
“Streng,” it was HongWei.
Joshua approached the loan soldier.
“Walk with me.”
HongWei lead Joshua out of the glaring floodlights and into the shadows. They walked towards the gate to a deserted spot. The reality of what HongWei might be about to do was settling into Joshua’s gut like food poisoning. He watched as the young man’s hand flinched in the vicinity of his pistol.
“I don’t know where she is, HongWei,” he ventured. “What kind of man would I be to lie to you now? I’d be a fool. You have won. I don’t know--”
HongWei held up a twitching finger to silence him. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, right? You say I have won, but she loves you, so, really…” He trailed off. Joshua almost pitied him.
“I’m no soldier, HongWei. Send me back.”
HongWei smiled. “A soldier? You? You would be a detriment to our cause. You are not like the rest of us. You don’t need to fight. You are something special. That’s why LanLan loves you. That is also why you must suffer.”
He didn’t go for his gun as Joshua expected, instead he took out a key and opened the gate leading out of the compound.
“Let’s see how you do in Taipei with no money, no papers and no violin. Get out of my sight.”
On that first backwards night in Taipei, Joshua couldn’t stop thinking of something Hanna had said on the night they first met. She was stunning and aloof and he was being flippant and self-deprecating, a foolproof seduction technique that wasn’t working on her. He had said something along the lines of, “I am inches away from the poor house, Hanna. I can hardly feed myself.” This was a lie, of course, Joshua was at the height of his early career. In fact they were at a party celebrating the Berlin premier of a work by a young Russian composer by the name of Dimitri Shostakovich. Joshua’s friend and mentor Bruno Walter had guest conducted his First Symphony to rave reviews. Joshua had played first violin and the after party was his first experience with copious amounts of vodka. Hanna wasn’t having any of it.
“As long as there are people in the world who feel things, a good musician will never go hungry,” she replied. Then, in a breeze of jasmine flower, she turned to converse with the shy, be speckled, Russian, for he knew how to hold his liquor.
It was to this statement that he hung as he negotiated his way through the colorful streets in search of an opportunity. He sought a small hole in the canvas, anything that would set things back to what he had trained himself to consider normal—and he was already stretched far past his breaking point.
The reception that awaited him on the busy streets of Taipei was remarkable. If Joshua was considered somewhat eye catching in Shanghai, here on the island he was a virtual enigma. Much of the local population hadn’t ever seen a westerner before, let alone one of Joshua’s size. This helped his plight—eventually--when a group of children, who had nicknamed him Ojisan, began bringing offerings to the alleyway where he had situated himself. But no momentum was gained.
Life in Taiwan was nonexistent for someone like Joshua. HongWei had picked exactly the right method of torture, for without music, he was almost totally impotent. If there was a violin on the island, he never came across it and after months of near starvation and nomadic wandering, odd jobs and begging, he decided that it was time to approach the ugly situation from a different angle.
The Erhu is a two-stringed instrument most commonly known as the Chinese violin. It is played sitting down, placed on top of the left thigh. Joshua first came in contact with them in the opera houses of Shanghai, but he didn’t give the erhu much credit. It only has two strings. What could be done with two strings—a bit, of course--but in comparison to the violin? He was someone who looked down on the ukulele--it was his snobbery that closed his ears back then and desperation that re-opened them now.
He caught sight of one on a street in Hsinchu and befriended the player, an elderly gentleman, whose name was Liu. Joshua would watch Liu play every morning till curiosity got the better of the man and he asked Joshua what it was about his playing that captivated him so.
“You may not know it, sir,” Joshua said, “but you are my first erhu teacher.” To prove this, Joshua convinced Liu to let him have a turn on the instrument and when he displayed a shocking amount of proficiency, “just from listening,” he said, the old man was impressed and invited Joshua for tea in his home, a humble, yet comfortable structure on the outskirts of town.
Not only was Liu a master of the erhu, he was also a craftsman of many forms of traditional Chinese string instruments. His house was his workshop and there was much to be done. So he worked, cross-legged on the floor before the fire, sanding the sound box of what would someday be a huquin, while Joshua told his story.
The old man, who was never big on words, listened and sanded, never taking his eyes off his work. When Joshua finished, he put down his sanding cloth and looked him long in the eyes. When he seemed satisfied, he got up and opened a cabinet beneath one of his workbenches.
“I bought this on the mainland. Many years ago. I could sell it to you, I suppose.”
It was wrapped in blue silk, the bow separately. A pretty little violin, smaller than the Lion--but what right did he have to be choosey? It reminded him of the one he played for General Kuboto, dainty, feminine, of Austrian make.
“May I?” He tuned while Liu went about his business, then played a melody, one by the Russian who he had been thinking about lately in the background of his memory. He was there with them all in that parlor drinking vodka, as the rain fell outside, as a goat trudged through the Taiwanese mud. He had lived too may lives, it was only a matter of time till they began to converge, till he no longer knew the past from the present, reality from dreams.
“You play it well, but I don’t know what you plan to do with it here. If you wish to buy your way back to the mainland, you will learn the erhu.”
Liu liked Joshua and offered him a sort of apprenticeship. He could live with him--there was a loft that didn’t get used. Liu’s hip was bad and he didn’t like the climb. Once he had worked off his first erhu, he could keep whatever money he made busking. The goal being to raise enough money to go back to the mainland and resume his search.
His days with Liu were monastic; routine like he had never know. Something about the beautiful island, named Formosa by the Portuguese, encouraged forgetting. It was his old image of China, the one he pictured on the Conte Camano--before he knew the realities of life in Shanghai--misty and otherworldly.
With every passing month he felt himself drifting further and further away. He played the erhu almost exclusively, the violin didn’t seem to make sense anymore. It was a European instrument, and had little effect on the gods that dwelled in the misty mountains of Taiwan. He managed to remain blissfully unaware of the changing political climate. The massacres in the Taipei, the corruption of the Chinese, it was all on the peripheral. He thought of BaiLan often, everyday, but he was loosing his urgency, as if island life had put him under a spell.
By 1949 he was practically mute, playing on the street in the morning and taking long constitutionals in the afternoons, listening to the wind, looking neither backwards or forwards. He had taken to meditating, to cooking for himself and Liu. He was studying the teachings of Buddha.
Then, in the spring, when the monsoons had died down, Liu came to him. He climbed the ladder into the loft, and sat beside Joshua early one morning and waited silently for him to wake. There was a beautiful sunrise that morning, they watched it together through the small window that faced the mountains. Liu told Joshua that he had saved more then enough money to get back to Hong Kong and though he would be sad to see him go, it was time for him to return to his life and his continue his journey. He gave him the erhu that Joshua had thoroughly mastered by that point, as well as the little violin--in case he was unable to locate his. Liu didn’t say much more than that. He didn’t make any detailed arguments, he simply said, “go,” and with this one word, broke Joshua’s two-year spell. He was released.
Once he shook of the Taiwan haze, he found himself reenergized and all he could think about was seeing BaiLan again. But how? His original plan was to go back to Hong Kong and resume his search there, but he questioned this. His gut told him he would find nothing.
He would go back to Hong Kong briefly, but only to retrieve his Lion. In a stroke of fortune, Mrs. Wong still had it and gladly accepted the trade for Liu’s violin. After that, he knew there was only one place left to go, and one person who would know the whereabouts of BaiLan. The person was Dean Chen and the place was Shanghai.
Chapter 23
23.
“Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G major, I. Prelude: Bach”
Max’s feet were itching. In the spring of 1945 he turned twenty-one and longed, more than anything, for freedom. He had devoured every last scrap of Shanghai and he felt it was time to move on. Alone.
That morning, the morning that marked the beginning of the end, he was on his way to play Chopin for a group of nervous Germans at the private residence of General Kuboto. It was routine for him by that point. Flashing a bright blue pass of his own, he breezed out of the Ghetto and into the gates of the highly guarded, tree-lined villa as if he owned the place. He made his way through the busy kitchen, greeting everyone along the way, and grabbed himself a cup of tea and a pastry or two from the spread set out for the guests. The kitchen staff allowed him that. They liked Max, the blonde boy who knew each and every one of their names. Then he would climb the narrow steps to his little perch on the balcony over looking Kuboto’s reception area.
It was a job that he had grown used to, one he didn’t think much about. In the beginning he had hated it, the thought of playing for his oppressors repelled him, but as he discovered, they didn’t really take much notice of him tucked away on the balcony. Most of them probably assumed he was a record player; they didn’t tend to look up very often. After he relaxed into the job and got over the fear that someone would cut his fingers off if he missed a note, he actually began to enjoy it. From above it was like watching a grand game of chess, two world super powers negotiating, trading strategy, but mostly eating as that is what seemed to take place at these receptions above all else.
Kuboto was unaware of Max’s mastery of Japanese as such a skill would no doubt get him promoted to the tenuous position of translator and they were an endangered species around the villa--constantly disappearing. No, he was just the lowly piano player. When asked, Max told them he played for ballet classes in Germany and that he wasn’t very good.
Still, his linguistic talents coupled with the crafty usage of his piano’s mute pedals served him well at times. For example, both sides were incredibly distrusting of the other. Kuboto referred to the Germans as apes and the Germans liked to poke fun at the Japanese for being short. Max knew that things weren’t going well in Europe and this knowledge made him antsy. If the war ended he could go home, or to America as was his most recent plan. He held tightly to an image of New York and dreams of soloing at a place called Carnegie Hall. It was this dream that kept him sane in those final days of the war.
Sometimes, if he got off early, he would go see Maestro at the Conservatory. Since Miss Bai left him, Joshua had become paranoid, manic, and Max was worried. He seemed to have gone off to a place within his mind that no one was granted access to. Max would give him updates on the war fresh from the horse’s mouth and attempt to coax some sort of plan from him. What did he intend to do when the war ended? In response all he got were vague scenarios involving the whereabouts of Miss Bai and how he planned to track her down. He would start searching in Hong Kong and if he didn’t find her, there were other cities, names and places she had talked about over the years, one in the north where she spent her summers, somewhere by the sea. Max felt for Joshua. He had been through so much and now as the world was on the brink of opening up to him again, all he could think about was going after a woman. He understood to some extent. He wasn’t able to save Hanna, by saving BaiLan he could put the world to rights again, if only in his own mind.
But if Max had learned anything in his travels, it was that the past was the past. There had been so many instances, so many opportunities over the years for him to confess to Joshua that he knew the bitter truth about that day in Berlin. For after mulling it over for months and months he was sure beyond all reasonable doubt that Bruno Pesch was the hand that held the smoking gun. Some days when he was playing at the villa he would spot a Nazi soldier with a similar gait, a familiar face from a distorted angle and a chill would run down the length of his back. But what good was it now? Why reopen such old wounds? He would have left it at that, except for the fact that, where Joshua was concerned, the wounds hadn’t ever healed. When Max saw him suffering, he wanted to tell him the truth but he was simply afraid. Joshua was the only family he had ever known and to lose the place he held in his affection was unbearable to think about.
His solution was a cowardly one, but in the end he opted for a letter. He had written it down and hidden it well. He wasn’t sure he would ever have the courage to deliver it, but at least it was on paper and out of his head. For one so skilled at compartmentalization, it seemed the only way to assuage his guilt.
Max sipped his tea, and with a pastry gripped between his teeth, set up his music on the piano before him. He didn’t need it, he had each and every one of Chopin’s waltzes committed to memory by the time he was ten, but he put it there anyway so as not to appear exceedingly clever. He even practiced a few scales for the benefit of no one.
He had been engaged in this mindless task for several minutes when he heard a commotion below. From what he could gather the Germans had surrendered to the Allies. The war in Europe was over. Max stopped playing abruptly when he heard this, causing the small group of Japanese soldiers to turn and look up at him with suspicion. He covered, giving them a small bow accompanied by an idiotic grin. It was early May, he hoped to arrive in New York by June.
But it was no to be. The Japanese were stubborn and strong, and instead of freedom what they got was another sweltering Shanghai summer, complete with flooded streets, vile smells and laissez-faire decomposition. Top that off with virtual famine, lack of clean drinkable water, and the occasional air raid and you have all the ingredients of despair. Max wanted the hell out and when it was suggested by Joshua that they both break parole and relocate to the Bai home where it was safer, he jumped at the chance.
In early August, they bid farewell to the Horowitz family and trudged out of HongKew for the last time. The route they took brought them by their old flat but neither one of them mentioned it. It felt like a lifetime ago, which only proved to remind them just how long they had been in Shanghai.
The two men walking side by side were vastly different people from the ones who had fled Germany. Max, once a flaxen haired pup, was now a man with manly worries and desires. And Joshua, though he didn’t feel any different, had changed as well. He had traversed, rather late in life, the gap between lover an warrior, though not completely. Something hardwired in his make up would forever make that last leap impossible. It accounted for the far away look in his eye, the one Max had worried about. It also accounted for his prophet like appearance. His hair and beard had grown long and his skin was dark and tanned from the unavoidable sun making his blue eyes blaze in his head like aquamarine. In the summer western clothes were impractical and both men opted for loose fitting peasant wear.
Shanghai had seeped into their pores. To Max it felt like home, a home he couldn’t wait to flee. To Joshua, every thing he had tolerated about the place fell out of view after BaiLan had gone.
The house felt like a welcome change at first, it gave them room to stretch their legs. But a prison is a prison no matter it’s size. The first point of contention was Miss Bai’s piano. Joshua didn’t think Max should play it, and Max whose only real musical outlet in the past four years had been his sessions with Kuboto, was dying to practice.
What bothered Max most was Joshua’s inconsistency, his reasons why Max shouldn’t play were always different. His first had to do with the noise, but even when Max played so quietly that he could hardly be heard in the next room, let alone from the street, Joshua would get at him about the piano being out of tune and that he couldn’t stand hearing it—he had very sensitive ears. When this didn’t work, he would exile Max from the living room altogether. Max had a hard time understanding why, out of all the rooms in the house, it was in the one room with a piano that Joshua chose to cloister himself, spending long hours on the mattress in the middle of the room staring at the ceiling (Max could see him through the window) when he claimed to be composing.
By early August cabin fever had set in. Joshua and Max were like two men stranded on a deserted island. They never left the house, all food and necessities were brought to them by Dean Chen’s daughter, left at the crack in the wall at the rear of the garden. Little things like the piano would cause explosive arguments. When a heat wave settled over the city and the sound of bombs in the night became deafening, Joshua locked himself in the living room and didn’t come out for three days.
The night of the fourteenth was a sweltering night, the darkness brought no break in the humidity that permeated every inch of the house. Max had been pacing the halls like a caged animal and at his wits end, decided to break another one of Maestro’s many rules involving the house and explore the upstairs rooms. Most of them were empty. What furniture was left was covered in sheets. In his frustration and boredom, Max began whipping them off sending clouds of dust into the air. Room after room, the light of a lone candle, revealed nothing but the ghost of a once vibrant household.
He was about to give up. To make his way back down to the pantry and finish off what was left of a bottle of gin he had been rationing since he liberated it from Kuboto’s compound, till a shape in the corner caught his eye. Leaning up against the wall, it was in everyway familiar. Max felt his stomach lurch. He bounded down the hall and stairs to get his gin before opening this sweetly wrapped present, and after a triumphant swig, he carefully lifted the sheet to reveal what could only have been Miss Bai’s cello.
It wasn’t the piano but it would do. To a talent like Max no musical instrument was really a stranger, so after another couple of swigs he perched on the edge of an abandoned bed frame and began tuning the thing back to life. The bow was brittle and dry but workable and the stings were still good, good enough for his purposes anyway which, on that evening was a familiar suite by Bach.
As Max played into the darkness, he couldn’t help but laugh to himself the way one does when drunk and thrust into self-reflection. He remembered the hopeful, cocky kid he used to be and pictured the expression on his face could he have seen the man he would become. He laughed and played, missing notes, then he was seized by the most wonderful of ideas, he would leave Shanghai, on foot if he had to. He would leave the very next morning. To hell with it all. To hell with Maestro, to hell with the Japanese, and borders, and passes, and rules. His historical inevitability would keep him alive. The fates would show mercy on him because they had cheated him out of what was rightfully his; love, fame and glory.
He would make his way along the Yangtse-Kiang and entering northern Burma. He would travel south to Rangoon and cross the Bay of Bengal to Madras where he would lay low until he could arrange passage back to Europe, from India it wouldn’t be that difficult if he could raise the money. And with Miss Bai’s cello he would be able to play his way home, it wasn’t that hard. He would master it eventually as he did everything else he set even a fraction of his mind to. He was deep into this fantasy when he heard the feet on the stairs. Maestro had heard his thoughts perhaps, and was coming to stop him. But it wouldn’t happen. Not that night. His days of indentured servitude were over and done with. He had put up with his masters moods and whims for far too long. He was sick of walking on eggshells around the fragile genius Joshua Streng. He wasn’t the only person in the world who had suffered loss. All pity would stop there.
Joshua stood in the doorway, his eyes blazing. He seemed more shocked than angry, as if seeing Max at the cello wasn’t what he was expecting, or maybe he wasn’t seeing Max at all but an apparition of Miss Bai, or Hanna or some other self-important sickly romantic vision that was sure to trump anything Max could ever feel.
He stopped playing and kicked over the empty bottle of gin to help wake Joshua from his attention sucking reverie.
“Max?”
Max started back in on the Bach.
“Enough of that, now. Let’s go downstairs. Do you want to get us caught?”
But Max just kept on playing.
“I said, enough.” Joshua advanced on his apprentice and ripped the bow from his hand so that Max was left with the cello that he then played like a bass while starring his Maestro down, his own crystalline eyes filled with fire.
“It’s not funny, Max.”
“No problem, without the bow it’s jazz.” Max backed towards the window, strumming out a bass line on the ailing cello.
“You’re drunk. Go downstairs and sleep it off.”
“I don’t think I will, Joshua. Charlie’s bringing the boys round. We’re gonna have a reunion. It’ll be like the bad old days back at Jin’s. Not like you would know, you were too good for us if I remember correctly. Hiding up the green room, feeling sorry for yourself. Till you graced us with your presence, showing off with the fucking Saint-Saens, then it was right back up to your little perch.”
“Why are you saying these things?” Joshua backed off, a touch wounded, while Max continued his bass line.
“Then, if all that self-pity wasn’t enough, you had to go and saddle yourself up with the ice princess. The endless Mendelssohn! Wasn’t that a barrel of laughs, teaching her how to speak German, how to play, I’m doing a better job of it right now, without the fucking bow! But you needed her and that was enough for me. You needed her and we put up with her.”
“You’re saying I neglected you, is that it? Is that what this is all about?”
“No! it’s about you, Joshua. It’s always about you. Ever since we left Europe it’s been one long fucking Symphony of despair composed and played by you! There are other people in the world, with their own problems. The Butterfly lost her husband and she got over it, she didn’t drag everyone that came close to her down into her hole. I lost my parents and I don’t dwell on it. I don’t carry it with me and torture people with it—“
“Max. I’d stop this if I were you.”
“No. It’s too late. You’ve always been selfish. If you weren’t so selfish Hanna might still be alive. We would be on a beach in Argentina reading about all of this in the papers, but the Pride of Berlin was too proud to leave when he had the chance. All of this is your doing.”
Max’s own words froze him to the quick. The cello fell out of his hands and slid down his body landing with and echo and a thump. Max followed it and crouched to the floor in tears. For a long moment there was only the sound of his sobs in the silence. Then, in the distance, a barrage of bombs, lighting up the not-so-distant horizon. It was coming closer.
Joshua sat beside him and leaned his tired head against the wall. “I remember when you came to live with us, Maxala, do you? After the accident you didn’t speak much, but you could play the piano. Your uncle thought it would be better for all involved if we took you on full time. He hated himself for it, but he still resented you for starting the fire that killed his sister and brother-in-law. It wasn’t your fault though, you were just a child. Hanna and I reminded you of that every night before you went to sleep. “It’s not your fault, Maxala,” we would say. We said it over and over again until you finally began to believe it. We didn’t want you to hurt, you see. We loved you very much. Like a son. You were our son. Perhaps we weren’t the best of parents, but we tried. I kept you at arms length because you were special. I had to treat you like an apprentice so you would respect me, so you would learn. If I spoiled you, your playing would have suffered, so I was hard on you. I made you work, and the older you got the better you got. Hanna used to call you Kinder-Brahms, do you remember that? Even she knew you were better than me, who she joked was crazy like Schumann, and that someday when I was locked up in the madhouse, you would be running things. I suppose I can understand why you blame me for her death, Max, but in the interest of full disclosure don’t you think we should all take responsibility for our part in this horribly sad opera if we really are to put this act to rest?”
Joshua leaned back and took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and put it in Max’s hand. Then he moved aside a flop of blonde hair and kissed the forehead of the only son he would ever know.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, and left him to his thoughts.
Max didn’t even have to look. He knew what had been placed in his hand. It was the letter he had written to Maestro confessing everything. Somehow he had found it. Maybe that had been his intention all along.
Outside the window the bombs continued to fall one after the other in quick succession. It was like the grand finale to a splendid fireworks show. He didn’t know it at the time, but Max was watching a finale of sorts. The next morning it would begin to surface that the Japanese had surrendered after terrible bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that leveled both cities. But by then Max would be long gone. In his second letter to Joshua, Max would beg him not to worry.
“Words cannot explain how sorry and how grateful I am for everything. We have always expressed ourselves in music and I vow that one day I will compose a tribute that will evoke in you all the emotions that fill my heart whenever I hear the name Joshua Streng. Master, mentor, father, I wish you all the happiness in the world. When you find Miss Bai I hope you shall consider bringing her west, as it is my intention to eventually settle in New York. Think of me, but please, do not worry. I am a survivor, as are you. This war shall end someday soon and we will all be free to heal, and love, and thrive once more…”
From the front porch of the Bai home, Joshua read the letter for the fifth time as he watched the sun come up on a broken city at peace. He was truly alone now, more alone then he had ever been, yet his heart was light. He had made it through a war that had taken from him everything he had ever loved and as the sun rose on this new day, this new act, this new era, he knew the time had come to start taking them back.
“Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 in G major, I. Prelude: Bach”
Max’s feet were itching. In the spring of 1945 he turned twenty-one and longed, more than anything, for freedom. He had devoured every last scrap of Shanghai and he felt it was time to move on. Alone.
That morning, the morning that marked the beginning of the end, he was on his way to play Chopin for a group of nervous Germans at the private residence of General Kuboto. It was routine for him by that point. Flashing a bright blue pass of his own, he breezed out of the Ghetto and into the gates of the highly guarded, tree-lined villa as if he owned the place. He made his way through the busy kitchen, greeting everyone along the way, and grabbed himself a cup of tea and a pastry or two from the spread set out for the guests. The kitchen staff allowed him that. They liked Max, the blonde boy who knew each and every one of their names. Then he would climb the narrow steps to his little perch on the balcony over looking Kuboto’s reception area.
It was a job that he had grown used to, one he didn’t think much about. In the beginning he had hated it, the thought of playing for his oppressors repelled him, but as he discovered, they didn’t really take much notice of him tucked away on the balcony. Most of them probably assumed he was a record player; they didn’t tend to look up very often. After he relaxed into the job and got over the fear that someone would cut his fingers off if he missed a note, he actually began to enjoy it. From above it was like watching a grand game of chess, two world super powers negotiating, trading strategy, but mostly eating as that is what seemed to take place at these receptions above all else.
Kuboto was unaware of Max’s mastery of Japanese as such a skill would no doubt get him promoted to the tenuous position of translator and they were an endangered species around the villa--constantly disappearing. No, he was just the lowly piano player. When asked, Max told them he played for ballet classes in Germany and that he wasn’t very good.
Still, his linguistic talents coupled with the crafty usage of his piano’s mute pedals served him well at times. For example, both sides were incredibly distrusting of the other. Kuboto referred to the Germans as apes and the Germans liked to poke fun at the Japanese for being short. Max knew that things weren’t going well in Europe and this knowledge made him antsy. If the war ended he could go home, or to America as was his most recent plan. He held tightly to an image of New York and dreams of soloing at a place called Carnegie Hall. It was this dream that kept him sane in those final days of the war.
Sometimes, if he got off early, he would go see Maestro at the Conservatory. Since Miss Bai left him, Joshua had become paranoid, manic, and Max was worried. He seemed to have gone off to a place within his mind that no one was granted access to. Max would give him updates on the war fresh from the horse’s mouth and attempt to coax some sort of plan from him. What did he intend to do when the war ended? In response all he got were vague scenarios involving the whereabouts of Miss Bai and how he planned to track her down. He would start searching in Hong Kong and if he didn’t find her, there were other cities, names and places she had talked about over the years, one in the north where she spent her summers, somewhere by the sea. Max felt for Joshua. He had been through so much and now as the world was on the brink of opening up to him again, all he could think about was going after a woman. He understood to some extent. He wasn’t able to save Hanna, by saving BaiLan he could put the world to rights again, if only in his own mind.
But if Max had learned anything in his travels, it was that the past was the past. There had been so many instances, so many opportunities over the years for him to confess to Joshua that he knew the bitter truth about that day in Berlin. For after mulling it over for months and months he was sure beyond all reasonable doubt that Bruno Pesch was the hand that held the smoking gun. Some days when he was playing at the villa he would spot a Nazi soldier with a similar gait, a familiar face from a distorted angle and a chill would run down the length of his back. But what good was it now? Why reopen such old wounds? He would have left it at that, except for the fact that, where Joshua was concerned, the wounds hadn’t ever healed. When Max saw him suffering, he wanted to tell him the truth but he was simply afraid. Joshua was the only family he had ever known and to lose the place he held in his affection was unbearable to think about.
His solution was a cowardly one, but in the end he opted for a letter. He had written it down and hidden it well. He wasn’t sure he would ever have the courage to deliver it, but at least it was on paper and out of his head. For one so skilled at compartmentalization, it seemed the only way to assuage his guilt.
Max sipped his tea, and with a pastry gripped between his teeth, set up his music on the piano before him. He didn’t need it, he had each and every one of Chopin’s waltzes committed to memory by the time he was ten, but he put it there anyway so as not to appear exceedingly clever. He even practiced a few scales for the benefit of no one.
He had been engaged in this mindless task for several minutes when he heard a commotion below. From what he could gather the Germans had surrendered to the Allies. The war in Europe was over. Max stopped playing abruptly when he heard this, causing the small group of Japanese soldiers to turn and look up at him with suspicion. He covered, giving them a small bow accompanied by an idiotic grin. It was early May, he hoped to arrive in New York by June.
But it was no to be. The Japanese were stubborn and strong, and instead of freedom what they got was another sweltering Shanghai summer, complete with flooded streets, vile smells and laissez-faire decomposition. Top that off with virtual famine, lack of clean drinkable water, and the occasional air raid and you have all the ingredients of despair. Max wanted the hell out and when it was suggested by Joshua that they both break parole and relocate to the Bai home where it was safer, he jumped at the chance.
In early August, they bid farewell to the Horowitz family and trudged out of HongKew for the last time. The route they took brought them by their old flat but neither one of them mentioned it. It felt like a lifetime ago, which only proved to remind them just how long they had been in Shanghai.
The two men walking side by side were vastly different people from the ones who had fled Germany. Max, once a flaxen haired pup, was now a man with manly worries and desires. And Joshua, though he didn’t feel any different, had changed as well. He had traversed, rather late in life, the gap between lover an warrior, though not completely. Something hardwired in his make up would forever make that last leap impossible. It accounted for the far away look in his eye, the one Max had worried about. It also accounted for his prophet like appearance. His hair and beard had grown long and his skin was dark and tanned from the unavoidable sun making his blue eyes blaze in his head like aquamarine. In the summer western clothes were impractical and both men opted for loose fitting peasant wear.
Shanghai had seeped into their pores. To Max it felt like home, a home he couldn’t wait to flee. To Joshua, every thing he had tolerated about the place fell out of view after BaiLan had gone.
The house felt like a welcome change at first, it gave them room to stretch their legs. But a prison is a prison no matter it’s size. The first point of contention was Miss Bai’s piano. Joshua didn’t think Max should play it, and Max whose only real musical outlet in the past four years had been his sessions with Kuboto, was dying to practice.
What bothered Max most was Joshua’s inconsistency, his reasons why Max shouldn’t play were always different. His first had to do with the noise, but even when Max played so quietly that he could hardly be heard in the next room, let alone from the street, Joshua would get at him about the piano being out of tune and that he couldn’t stand hearing it—he had very sensitive ears. When this didn’t work, he would exile Max from the living room altogether. Max had a hard time understanding why, out of all the rooms in the house, it was in the one room with a piano that Joshua chose to cloister himself, spending long hours on the mattress in the middle of the room staring at the ceiling (Max could see him through the window) when he claimed to be composing.
By early August cabin fever had set in. Joshua and Max were like two men stranded on a deserted island. They never left the house, all food and necessities were brought to them by Dean Chen’s daughter, left at the crack in the wall at the rear of the garden. Little things like the piano would cause explosive arguments. When a heat wave settled over the city and the sound of bombs in the night became deafening, Joshua locked himself in the living room and didn’t come out for three days.
The night of the fourteenth was a sweltering night, the darkness brought no break in the humidity that permeated every inch of the house. Max had been pacing the halls like a caged animal and at his wits end, decided to break another one of Maestro’s many rules involving the house and explore the upstairs rooms. Most of them were empty. What furniture was left was covered in sheets. In his frustration and boredom, Max began whipping them off sending clouds of dust into the air. Room after room, the light of a lone candle, revealed nothing but the ghost of a once vibrant household.
He was about to give up. To make his way back down to the pantry and finish off what was left of a bottle of gin he had been rationing since he liberated it from Kuboto’s compound, till a shape in the corner caught his eye. Leaning up against the wall, it was in everyway familiar. Max felt his stomach lurch. He bounded down the hall and stairs to get his gin before opening this sweetly wrapped present, and after a triumphant swig, he carefully lifted the sheet to reveal what could only have been Miss Bai’s cello.
It wasn’t the piano but it would do. To a talent like Max no musical instrument was really a stranger, so after another couple of swigs he perched on the edge of an abandoned bed frame and began tuning the thing back to life. The bow was brittle and dry but workable and the stings were still good, good enough for his purposes anyway which, on that evening was a familiar suite by Bach.
As Max played into the darkness, he couldn’t help but laugh to himself the way one does when drunk and thrust into self-reflection. He remembered the hopeful, cocky kid he used to be and pictured the expression on his face could he have seen the man he would become. He laughed and played, missing notes, then he was seized by the most wonderful of ideas, he would leave Shanghai, on foot if he had to. He would leave the very next morning. To hell with it all. To hell with Maestro, to hell with the Japanese, and borders, and passes, and rules. His historical inevitability would keep him alive. The fates would show mercy on him because they had cheated him out of what was rightfully his; love, fame and glory.
He would make his way along the Yangtse-Kiang and entering northern Burma. He would travel south to Rangoon and cross the Bay of Bengal to Madras where he would lay low until he could arrange passage back to Europe, from India it wouldn’t be that difficult if he could raise the money. And with Miss Bai’s cello he would be able to play his way home, it wasn’t that hard. He would master it eventually as he did everything else he set even a fraction of his mind to. He was deep into this fantasy when he heard the feet on the stairs. Maestro had heard his thoughts perhaps, and was coming to stop him. But it wouldn’t happen. Not that night. His days of indentured servitude were over and done with. He had put up with his masters moods and whims for far too long. He was sick of walking on eggshells around the fragile genius Joshua Streng. He wasn’t the only person in the world who had suffered loss. All pity would stop there.
Joshua stood in the doorway, his eyes blazing. He seemed more shocked than angry, as if seeing Max at the cello wasn’t what he was expecting, or maybe he wasn’t seeing Max at all but an apparition of Miss Bai, or Hanna or some other self-important sickly romantic vision that was sure to trump anything Max could ever feel.
He stopped playing and kicked over the empty bottle of gin to help wake Joshua from his attention sucking reverie.
“Max?”
Max started back in on the Bach.
“Enough of that, now. Let’s go downstairs. Do you want to get us caught?”
But Max just kept on playing.
“I said, enough.” Joshua advanced on his apprentice and ripped the bow from his hand so that Max was left with the cello that he then played like a bass while starring his Maestro down, his own crystalline eyes filled with fire.
“It’s not funny, Max.”
“No problem, without the bow it’s jazz.” Max backed towards the window, strumming out a bass line on the ailing cello.
“You’re drunk. Go downstairs and sleep it off.”
“I don’t think I will, Joshua. Charlie’s bringing the boys round. We’re gonna have a reunion. It’ll be like the bad old days back at Jin’s. Not like you would know, you were too good for us if I remember correctly. Hiding up the green room, feeling sorry for yourself. Till you graced us with your presence, showing off with the fucking Saint-Saens, then it was right back up to your little perch.”
“Why are you saying these things?” Joshua backed off, a touch wounded, while Max continued his bass line.
“Then, if all that self-pity wasn’t enough, you had to go and saddle yourself up with the ice princess. The endless Mendelssohn! Wasn’t that a barrel of laughs, teaching her how to speak German, how to play, I’m doing a better job of it right now, without the fucking bow! But you needed her and that was enough for me. You needed her and we put up with her.”
“You’re saying I neglected you, is that it? Is that what this is all about?”
“No! it’s about you, Joshua. It’s always about you. Ever since we left Europe it’s been one long fucking Symphony of despair composed and played by you! There are other people in the world, with their own problems. The Butterfly lost her husband and she got over it, she didn’t drag everyone that came close to her down into her hole. I lost my parents and I don’t dwell on it. I don’t carry it with me and torture people with it—“
“Max. I’d stop this if I were you.”
“No. It’s too late. You’ve always been selfish. If you weren’t so selfish Hanna might still be alive. We would be on a beach in Argentina reading about all of this in the papers, but the Pride of Berlin was too proud to leave when he had the chance. All of this is your doing.”
Max’s own words froze him to the quick. The cello fell out of his hands and slid down his body landing with and echo and a thump. Max followed it and crouched to the floor in tears. For a long moment there was only the sound of his sobs in the silence. Then, in the distance, a barrage of bombs, lighting up the not-so-distant horizon. It was coming closer.
Joshua sat beside him and leaned his tired head against the wall. “I remember when you came to live with us, Maxala, do you? After the accident you didn’t speak much, but you could play the piano. Your uncle thought it would be better for all involved if we took you on full time. He hated himself for it, but he still resented you for starting the fire that killed his sister and brother-in-law. It wasn’t your fault though, you were just a child. Hanna and I reminded you of that every night before you went to sleep. “It’s not your fault, Maxala,” we would say. We said it over and over again until you finally began to believe it. We didn’t want you to hurt, you see. We loved you very much. Like a son. You were our son. Perhaps we weren’t the best of parents, but we tried. I kept you at arms length because you were special. I had to treat you like an apprentice so you would respect me, so you would learn. If I spoiled you, your playing would have suffered, so I was hard on you. I made you work, and the older you got the better you got. Hanna used to call you Kinder-Brahms, do you remember that? Even she knew you were better than me, who she joked was crazy like Schumann, and that someday when I was locked up in the madhouse, you would be running things. I suppose I can understand why you blame me for her death, Max, but in the interest of full disclosure don’t you think we should all take responsibility for our part in this horribly sad opera if we really are to put this act to rest?”
Joshua leaned back and took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and put it in Max’s hand. Then he moved aside a flop of blonde hair and kissed the forehead of the only son he would ever know.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, and left him to his thoughts.
Max didn’t even have to look. He knew what had been placed in his hand. It was the letter he had written to Maestro confessing everything. Somehow he had found it. Maybe that had been his intention all along.
Outside the window the bombs continued to fall one after the other in quick succession. It was like the grand finale to a splendid fireworks show. He didn’t know it at the time, but Max was watching a finale of sorts. The next morning it would begin to surface that the Japanese had surrendered after terrible bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that leveled both cities. But by then Max would be long gone. In his second letter to Joshua, Max would beg him not to worry.
“Words cannot explain how sorry and how grateful I am for everything. We have always expressed ourselves in music and I vow that one day I will compose a tribute that will evoke in you all the emotions that fill my heart whenever I hear the name Joshua Streng. Master, mentor, father, I wish you all the happiness in the world. When you find Miss Bai I hope you shall consider bringing her west, as it is my intention to eventually settle in New York. Think of me, but please, do not worry. I am a survivor, as are you. This war shall end someday soon and we will all be free to heal, and love, and thrive once more…”
From the front porch of the Bai home, Joshua read the letter for the fifth time as he watched the sun come up on a broken city at peace. He was truly alone now, more alone then he had ever been, yet his heart was light. He had made it through a war that had taken from him everything he had ever loved and as the sun rose on this new day, this new act, this new era, he knew the time had come to start taking them back.
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