Chapter 12

12.
“A Winter Morning: Tchaikovsky”

The sun-drenched morning had done a very good job of heating the small drafty room in which Max, Frau Schmetterling and Joshua now rested, but its brightness made it hard to sleep. It had been a strange night to say the least and sleep wasn’t interested in any of them. There was so much to process before retiring, so many new and fantastical images to file away, so many oddities to catalog, so much danger to fear that, even then, locked away in that tiny flat, not one of them felt completely safe.

In order to best envision the events of that night into early morning leading up to the sun warmed room in which they lay, one must first have a clear picture of the little band of refugees who took it upon themselves to wander away from the safety of the ship out into the Shanghai night. Firstly there was Joshua. It is of foremost importance to note his height. In Germany he was considered very tall. Lang, his mother would call him, add to that the fact that he was wearing a top hat on the night in question (not bothered to carry it in its box as they had enough luggage as it was) you have the makings of a virtual bearded giant among the diminutive Chinese. Frau Schmetterling drew the eye as well. Clad completely in a deep red velvet dress and fur lined coat to match, she had in girth what Joshua had in height, making her seem like an over sized robin red breast waddling up ahead. Next consider Max, with his white blonde hair and Aryan angles, he practically glowed in the streetlight, reflecting off everything. Even those who were able to get past the height of Joshua and the redness of Frau Schmetterling couldn’t help but notice Max the way one notices a coin glistening on an empty path. It was this three ring circus along with a good amount of luggage and an urn full of jewels that set out on a wintry three a.m. tour of downtown Shanghai.

It was Frau Schmetterling’s intention to find a hotel, something along the lines of the Ritz, where they could hole up for the night. Though together they didn’t have more than a few Deutschmarks on them, she felt this wouldn’t matter since they possessed collateral, were well dressed, and had trustworthy faces. She had never been denied credit in Berlin and had no reason to think that things would be any different in Shanghai. Well, she was wrong of course. They did find a hotel almost immediately, there was a fine looking one right along the stretch of road facing the port, a grand marble building with a golden entryway, pillars and European light fixtures. Frau Schmetterling ascended its stairs as if she were arriving home and nearly fainted from the shock when they weren’t permitted credit.

“Well that’s preposterous,” Frau Schmetterling was mortally offended. The bellman wanted to know if they had any money and didn’t understand when Max tried explaining the concepts of collateral, just who Frau Schmetterling was, and how dare he not let them stay in his primitive hotel. The one word he did understand was credit.

“No. No credit, refugee.”

Seeing the pointlessness of all this, thanks to his newly honed ability to see the pointlessness in almost any situation, Joshua headed back to the ship ahead of an irrational Madame Butterfly and an ever-tolerant Max.

The street was cold, empty and alien. From where he stood he could see down dimly lit avenues with their boarded up storefronts. He imagined them vivisected each morning spilling their wares out on to the walk, making the streets even narrower. He pictured shops that sold giant glass-eyed fish and pastry made with green jelly. He looked on dormant carts, rickshaws and envisioned them overflowing with people and goods. He imagined the smell of the day, warm hay, waste, acidic rot. He wanted to go home, or he wanted to die. Everything else was too vivid, too cutting, too present, he put his hand to his head to massage out a spike of despair, and like a shadow, something came up behind him and stole his violin.

It happened so quickly it took his breath away. Joshua stood there, dumbstruck, as the perpetrator ran off with the Lion. He heard feet hitting the pavement--clack, clack, clack--ten times before he was able to move, to scream, to will his feet to run in pursuit of that which was rightfully his.

“Halten Sie an! Dieb!” His voice echoed in the empty street, it rang with anger. And not the casual anger of the generally content, this was altogether new. His was the type of anger felt by someone who knows what it means to be violated, someone with a grudge to settle. Joshua ran after the thief with long determined strides, over the glassy black pavement, around corners and down nightmare streets that all looked the same. He noticed a vendor opening up shop, a stray dog licking at a puddle, but other than that, the maze he ran was a series of empty alleys and it wasn’t hard to keep his shadowy prey in sight.

They had been running for quite a while when the figure turned a corner and vanished. Joshua stopped to catch his breath and listened. He was close. The street was a dead end with homes, or what passed for homes, shacks on top of one another, curtained off and practically dilapidated. The thief must have lived here. It looked like a place where a thief would live. He was hiding waiting for Joshua to give up and leave, so that’s what he did. He raised his hands and let them drop to his sides. “Ich gebe auf,” he said, “you are the better man. You win the day.” And just as Joshua was turning to leave, he noticed the slightest of movements from beyond a curtain in the corner of the cul-de-sac.

Joshua was as close to a murderous rage as he had ever been, even more so in fact, than Kristallnacht—what the papers had taken to calling the night Hanna died (a word he found sickly romantic.) Even when he was inadvertently contributing to history by smashing every item in his home, his rage was reactionary. It was the gestation process by sea, the pickling if you will, that had now focused his anger, distilled it, aged it, so that as he ran--as he hunted the unfortunate soul who had stolen from him, he knew he would have no qualms about exacting revenge at the expense of his hands, his violin, his freedom and his life.

He turned on his heal without much dexterity, and tripping over his long limbs in the process, made it to the door of the shack and slammed it in with all his strength.

The room he entered was pitch black and smelled of incense and sweat. Joshua advanced into it. He was terrified yet somehow elated by his anger as he groped through the darkness pitying the person or thing his hands would eventually meet. They met a wall soon enough, and in an explosion of rage, Joshua hit it with all his might, sending fist through plaster and screaming, “Geben Sie zurück, was meinig ist!”

In a corner a match was lit and turning to spring upon it, intending to attack the source of such audacious illumination, Joshua saw an old man looking up at him with barely any expression on his face at all. He had been sleeping and was clearly not the perpetrator.

Joshua looked at his hand. It was gray with plaster. The wall he punctured was above a homemade shrine of incense, candles and ghost money. Now all of it was sprinkled with the plaster dust like snow. His anger melted into shame as he backed away, an apology on his lips, but the old man raised a withered hand. With a nod he gestured toward a curtained off doorway just past the shrine. Joshua went through.

The room was little more than a dirt floor, a cot, and a tiny window. There were clothes on the floor which looked more like dust covered rags, and spinning in the window was a mobile of sorts made up of paper cranes. He noticed a tiny pair of sandals in one corner that could only have belonged to a child, and on the cot, illuminated by a sliver of moonlight, was the Lion.

Something stirred from beneath. He now had an image of his thief; a poor, cold, hungry child, probably forced to steal by the man in the other room who had so callously given him up to a deranged, bearded giant. He was glad the child stayed hidden. If he had come out to face him, if he saw the child’s eyes, he wasn’t so sure he would have left that shack with his violin or if he would have given it up to its abductor. It was only an object after all, and what cowered under the cot was breathing.

He though of Igor, the ugly thought that had set him to destroy his house. He could hear the boy’s breath. He imagined a tiny birdlike chest rising and falling, waiting in terror, wondering what the giant would do next. Would it blow off the cot like a leaf and devour the child, or would it be benevolent? Joshua took his wedding band from his finger and kneeled. A ray of moonlight revealed a pair of dirty hands that shrunk back from him as soon as he got close.

“I’m taking my violin, but you can have this, yes?” He set his ring on the floor. Hanna would have been so proud of him. In Buenos Aries she was constantly giving their things away to poor children. He never said anything, but watching her hand over her money and jewelry conjured an image of a silver winged angel giving out shot glasses of water in hell.

A little hand snatched the ring and Joshua left hurriedly, passing the old man who yelled angry words in his direction. Maybe he was sorry that he didn’t give the boy a beating, or maybe it was because of the hole he left in his wall, either way, he thought it best to flee without looking back.

On the street Joshua was alone with the sound of his heart thumping in his chest. After fifty tense yards, he fell out of a jog and when he was sure that no one followed, he tucked the Lion firmly under his arm and tried to divine his way back to port. But just as he suspected the streets had begun to unfurl. This changed the look of things and made it impossible to decipher where he was.

Shanghai had swallowed him with one foul gulp into its labyrinth of innards. Everything and everyone looked like everything and everyone else. And as the streets began to fill with people, he felt assaulted by this repetition of images. Old women sat on stoops, young men carried bundles of goods from point A to point B, there was a good amount of sorting going on. Beggars held up walls with their gnarled spines, children chased carts cutting holes in bags of rice and noodles then gathered their bounty from the filthy road. Men prayed before of temples, cones of scented smoke rising into the morning sky. Narrow streets lined with colorful vertical banners advertised all the things these people needed so they would know by looking where to get them. They had this in Berlin too, they were called shops, but here it seemed like a new concept, a crazy, zany idea that with a little work might someday border on brilliance.

Joshua walked like a tower among them and was virtually ignored which made the experience feel altogether dreamlike. When a young man caught his eye, he attempted to ask directions. “Bund,” was all he could think to say, as he knew this was the name of the portside street where he had been assaulted. Someone had mentioned it on the boat and he retained it. It worried him that he knew this word. It was distressing to think of it as a launching point for the many words he would have to learn in order to exist here. He didn’t want to learn new words and more so, he didn’t want the old ones to fade. The young man looked away without engaging him. If he understood he wasn’t letting on. So Joshua continued to walk.

The sky began to lighten from dark gray to blue and dirty colors sprung to life around him. Gold and red were predominant, laced with black, green, and everything in between. He found it boisterous and overbearing, the day light only increasing his desire for escape.

“Bund?” He said again to anyone within earshot. “Bund?” He repeated the word like a mantra pointing ahead, behind, fitting word with gesture so they would have to understand. Finally after blocks of this someone saw him. A man, with bad teeth and a basket strapped to his back heard his plea and began pointing not in the direction he was going but to the left of them, down a wider street that, through the language barrier, Joshua was convinced would take him back to the ship. There had been a moment of connection so Joshua walked this street in hopes of finding his way.

If he could have understood Mandarin he might not have done so. The truth of the matter was that when he ran into the man who had been kind enough to point him in the wrong direction, he was only a block or two from the boat. In fact, if he had continued on his course he would have walked right back down along the street where he had initially began his chase. Loosely translated, the man with the basket had said the following, “You are lost refugee. You don’t live here. You live in Hong Kew.”
To which Joshua replied, “Bund?”

“No, no, the Bund is not for you. Trust me, you want Hong Kew.” And to punctuate he pointed in the direction he thought Joshua should go. Which was not where Joshua thought he was going as he went there.

A few blocks away Max and Frau Schmetterling had problems of their own. First, they had lost Joshua. When they finally gave up their attempts to get a room at the Hotel, opting for the sanctuary of the ship, they were shocked to find Joshua’s suitcases sitting alone in the middle of the road sans their owner. It was Max who panicked. He assumed that Maestro had wandered off in a fit of depression to take his own life. Frau Schmetterling, on the other hand, didn’t believe this to be true and tried her best to console the boy. He was past trying to take his life, she knew this; someone must have abducted him. It was the only reasonable solution. How this was supposed to console Max was still up for discussion but there wasn’t time.

The pair returned to the ship. They had friends there who would help them figure out what to do. But as they made their way along the dock bogged down with even more luggage, they were devastated to find that the gangplank pulled up, the ship dark and silent.

Max began yelling. He relayed the whole story to the side of the ship twice before a familiar face appeared in a porthole.

“Fritzi, we need to come aboard. It’s Maestro, he’s been taken,” Max cried.

“The Japs won’t do it, Max. Some kids tried to come aboard and they closed it down for the night. You’re going to have to wait till morning.”

“But Maestro is missing.”

Frau Schmetterling ruffled her feathers. “Do something Fritzi or you’re out of the quartet,” an inane threat that seemed to work.

“Hold on.” The boy disappeared for a long minute. And when he returned, “My father says you should have stayed on the boat to begin with.”

“Fritzi, stop talking and do something this instant.” Frau Schmetterling was irate.

Fritzi’s little head vanished once more from the porthole and after another long minute, “Father says to go to Hong Kew,” pause, “that’s where all the other refugees are,” pause, “they’ll speak German.” Pause. “Just go there, go to the police there.”

“Where is it?”

Fritzi’s head vanished once more and was replaced by the imposing head of his father.

“Remember those shacks we passed as we came up the river? That’s it. You just walk down the bank when you get there you’ll know. We’re going to go back to sleep now if you don’t mind.” And with that he slammed the porthole shut.

“He didn’t have to be quite so rude,” Frau Schmetterling said loudly enough to be heard through glass, “there’s no reason for it.”

But Max knew there was. He and Fritzi had been special friends. For the young man had an oral fixation that was as incurable as it was unquenchable. One of which his father obviously didn’t approve. They would play this game, Max and Fritzi, Max would have his violin and the higher the notes got, the closer he would be to… But he didn’t have time for Fritzi. Fritzi would be with him whenever he ventured into the C7.

“We have to do something about all this luggage,” Max said, changing his own subject.
Frau Schmetterling offered to say with the bags but Max wouldn’t ever leave her. So they went back to the hotel. In the end it cost Madame Butterfly an ash covered ruby broach, but Max managed to persuade the hotel manager to watch their things for the evening while they looked for their friend. After some repacking, they set off down the icy bank with a small bag each of valuable necessities and watched the sun come up over the majestic Wangpoo River.

It was daylight when they reached Hong Kew. Max was worried that he wouldn’t know it when he saw it the way Fritzi’s father had said. But even a privileged Berliner knows a slum when he sees one. The congested streets with houses crammed together and piled just as high as they could be without tipping over, only here, the signs were written in Chinese and in German. Max was floored. It was just so odd. As they advanced into Hong Kew, he noticed a Café and a theatre advertising productions in Yiddish. Signs for German doctors and repairmen hung alongside the foreign characters Max’s brain had already begun categorizing. It was as if this small section of Shanghai had contracted the German Measles; they popped up everywhere. Hasidic men congregated on a corner near a group of women emptying buckets onto a cart. A red headed boy played with a Chinese girl in the shadow of a European newspaper stand. This mismatched chaos made Max smile. The part of him not worried about Maestro felt alive here, excited.

Frau Schmetterling, though wearing her most German face, was moments from dropping. She had turned seventy-one that past summer and her body wasn’t what it used to be. The signs written in German made her sigh with relief. It was like reaching an outpost on a difficult climb, for Frau Schmetterling had climbed extensively during her youth in India, or “traipsing about in the Himalayas,” as she used to call it. She would have told Max this, but if she spoke he would have seen how out of breath she was and worried, so the pair continued quietly to the interior of the odd little outpost until they reached a place to rest, an exact replica of a Russian Café.

Frau Schmetterling wanted to go to the police but Max talked her out of it. He didn’t trust police anywhere and by the looks of things in Hong Kew, not trusting them here seemed wise. He surveyed the area for suitable contact and his eyes fell on a group of men who sat smoking and drinking coffee in a booth near the back. He didn’t trust Russians either but he did trust their reputation for getting things done and felt their outrage over a missing German virtuoso would surpass that of the Chinese. With a deep breath he rose, approached them, and in perfect Russian said, “I’m sorry to bother you gentlemen, but I’m in dire need of help.”

A young man looked up at him. He was maybe two or three years older than Max and had a scar over the left side of his face the stretched from his lip to his eye. Max’s heart dropped.

“You’re not Russian.”

“German.”

“A Jew?”

“No, but I’m looking for one.”

The man with the scar stood, he towered over Max. His friends stood too. “And you want us to help you, to give up a brother to a scrawny piece of Aryan trash? Leave this Café now, my son, before we do it for you.”

“No please, you don’t understand,” Max pled as they surrounded him, “we just arrived here this morning. My master was kidnapped.”

“Your what?”

“I’m his apprentice. We are musicians from Berlin. Joshua Streng is his name, he went missing in the Old Bund.”

The man with the scar pulled back and raised a finger to his dogs. “Joshua Streng? He played in Moscow when I was a boy. Joshua Streng is in Shanghai?”

“Yes. I hope. They took him.”

“What is your name, my son?”

“Max Schmied.”

“And your lady friend?”

“That’s Frau Schmetterling, and her husband Leonard, in the box.”

“Anton Samoilovich. Why don’t you sit down Max Schmied and tell me what happened.”

As Max began mounting his search party, the missing German virtuoso continued to wander the streets and eventually began to notice the signs, too. He approached Hong Kew from a more northerly point so that in reality the severed trio had been walking parallel to each other for quite some time. Joshua had no way of knowing this. In his mind they were back at the ship and he was lost in the wilderness. To make it worse, he was convinced he was being followed.

He held the Lion close as he dogged through human traffic, making sharp turns and ducking into alleys whenever he could. Was it paranoia, exhaustion, had he become the target of more thieves, or worse? The men who followed him, he was sure they were white, possibly German. Could they be Nazi’s? It was an insane thought, why would they have followed him here? They looked like the looters he and Max had pressed through on the night Hanna died. But it couldn’t be. He started to run, looking over his shoulder, and when the men ran too, he picked up speed turning a corner and crashing headlong into a body balancing two baskets from a shoulder pole.

Joshua fell backwards to the ground trying instinctively to protect the Lion as the baskets of nearly rotted food flipped through the air and spilled on top of him. Children came out of the woodwork like insects to gather what had been dropped into their territory, and Joshua screamed as their hungry little hands set upon him. But soon, one by one, their grabbing fingers were torn from him, and the vegetables adorning his jacket, by a man with a scar who lifted the children off of him like kittens.

“Maestro Streng, welcome to Shanghai.” Anton helped him to his feet and within moments the trio was reunited.

Joshua embraced Max, a gesture unpracticed in nearly a decade, then kissed Frau Schmetterling once on each cheek which made her blush. He relayed the story of the theft in a much-abbreviated fashion and suggested they return to the ship. When Max told him of their incident with Fritzi, it was decided that they find lodging there in Hong Kew. Anton knew of a temporary place and set them up in a small dusty room with two beds and no curtains. The men shared the larger bed, and Frau Schmetterling, who had been hoping for the Ritz, curled up gratefully in a bed meant for a child.

As the sun streamed in, warming them, they could hear the sounds of an alien morning. The rats had retired for the day, the streets had begun to pick up. Chinese, German, Baghdadi, and Russian were spoken interchangeably below as things were sorted and carried, moved and sold. Commerce and drama occurred alongside one another in a rousing symphony that could have easily been entitled “Life goes on.” And once their minds took firm hold of this, once they realized the way a criminal must on his first night in prison that there is no escaping, that this was now their lot, their world, and that the drama below would become their drama, they were able to sleep in the bright, all encompassing light of resignation.