Chapter 15

15.
String Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 51, No. 1: III. Allegretto molto moderato e comodo - Un poco più animato: Brahms

HongWei was not traditionally excitable. But the events that unfolded on the evening of the concert had him in rare form. As the crowd filed out of the theatre, he was on high alert, visibly upset. And for HongWei, the young man who bore a remarkable resemblance to the marble statue of himself adorning his parents garden in looks as well as degree of animation, this outburst of expression was notable to say the least.

There was to be a reception in one of the conservatory’s guilded halls, but HongWei wanted none of it. After his conversation with Charlie regarding his future fiancée’s nightly excursions to watch some Jewish refugee play the violin at a nightclub, he had developed a sour stomach that was very possibly incurable. Still, despite this sickness and his erratically fluctuating facial expressions, he had to remain calm for the sake of the parents. The parents who, at that very moment were bowing to this European Yeti and exchanging pleasantries with him while BaiLan--his BaiLan--stood by like an angel in her pale blue dress gazing at him with ‘wonders and admirations.’
Oh, he had seen her little note. She and her family were having dinner at their home, a thought that made him shudder, and he was hanging her coat. He had taken to looking through her pockets--as her future husband it was his duty--and as his future wife, it was her duty to keep them clean and empty except maybe for a scented handkerchief or glove. What they shouldn’t contain--what they absolutely shouldn’t contain under any circumstances--was a letter of admiration to an oversized stateless refugee--a stateless refugee now talking with the head of the conservatory.

HongWei would have excused himself to get some air, but he was already outside. Charlie had dragged him off to brag about how “cool” it was that BaiLan was getting into jazz. Infuriated by this, he retired to the railing and pressed his body as close to it as possible. It was as if he were trying to become one with the marble. He liked marble. It wasn’t shifty and secretive it didn’t go out at night and keep strange letters. He wanted a wife made of marble. But it seemed he was wrong about BaiLan, and HongWei hated being wrong.

“HongWei?”

He turned and saw her standing there, shivering in the cold evening. God, she was beautiful, ideal in so many ways--the perfect compliment to him. It pained him that she was no longer in his heart--for he had cast her out halfway through the Mendelssohn piano trio. Maybe there was a way she could redeem herself, but how?
“Hello, BaiLan,” he didn’t hold her gaze. He looked away, off into the bare and silver trees surrounding the patio.

“Did you enjoy the concert?”

Did he enjoy the concert? What a question. Why were women so flippant? Did he enjoy the concert? Who was this person and what had she done with his stone rose? “The concert was very enjoyable. I thank you, on behalf of my family.”

“Your presence honors us.”

Ah, her little voice. So lilting, he had to find a way to forgive her. Maybe if he gave her a chance to repent on her own, maybe if he shed light on her sins and let her ask him for forgiveness… That was the only way. He spoke to her, his eyes on the trees. He wanted what he said to resound off all of nature, to echo in the ears of her ancestors.

“BaiLan, I know where you’ve been spending your nights and I know about the attention you’ve been paying to that refugee violinist. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you, but I am a compassionate man and I am ready to accept your apology.”

There was a long silence. She must have been pondering his words, the poor lamb. He hoped he hadn’t been too hard on her. But he also hoped she wouldn’t take too long before begging for forgiveness.

But when he turned, she was gone. He had been talking to no one. The thought that his well-chosen words had been wasted, cast out into the ether, startled HongWei and he decided that perhaps it was time to leave the party. He didn’t want to go back inside, he didn’t want to have to face her. She had lowered herself in his eyes. So why did he still feel compelled to save her? Overcome with these thoughts he decided to change tactics. He would deal with the situation in a more pragmatic way; he would show her father the letter, which is exactly what he would eventually do anyway.

Back inside the reception continued. The setting was perfect for love; a cold wintry night, filtered golden light playing off a sophisticated crowd, everyone and everything glowing. It was cinematic, just begging for an outpouring of hearts to liven some perfectly lit corner. There would be champagne--maybe it would occur near the grand piano--Joshua would tell BaiLan that her playing had stirred his soul. That he felt so alone and that he felt she was alone, too. It would begin with a flourish, it would swell like a symphony, and it would end in bittersweet tragedy. They would kiss and worlds would collide. They would kiss and doorways to potential futures would be thrown wide, children that might never have been conceived would be born, live and die. It would be a scene the walls would remember. Young couples would go there to fall under the spell, again and again, generations after the fact. The magic of Joshua and BaiLan, who transcended language and culture, who came together despite…

All of that.

And none of that, for none of that happened. The only interaction between Joshua and BaiLan on that evening was one of sad confusion.

She sought his opinion of the concert, and Joshua, ever the gentleman, said it was, “cleanly executed” and “über dem Durchschnitt--above average.” A German musician would have sensed this was not the best of compliments, the way upon seeing a bad actress in a play one sticks to comments about how lovely her costume looked. But when translated into Chinese for BaiLan this subtle meaning was lost. She thought he found it brilliant, above the rest, and her ego was satiated.

Several things of note came out of that evening. Joshua was offered a laureate position at the conservatory on his reputation alone, Max was given a sort of scholarship to work alongside him, and Frau Schmetterling who everyone assumed was Joshua’s mother, was pleased to learn that with all of this came lodging. The three would be moved into flat near the school so Joshua could begin piecing together his orchestra. They were honored to have him, this prodigy from Berlin who soloed with European Philharmonics and in his spare time directed irreverent operas. “Why do the Germans hate your people so,” they asked. Joshua had no answer. “You will simply do your work here now,” they said, “we welcome you.” And, ‘we’re sorry about your wife.”
As for BaiLan, when HongWei delivered that offending letter of hers into the hands of her father, the ground shaking reality and shame of it was enough to break her fortnight-long spell. In the weeks following the concert she would return to normal in such a profound way that it was almost as if Joshua had never existed at all. She would look back on that week the way one looks back on a bad cold. It was awful, but she had gotten better and business could continue as usual. And it did, for close to six months.

Life went on for a while. Max learned Mandarin, Joshua got lost in his work, and Frau Schmetterling held tightly to what remained of her senses. They fashioned a home of sorts in a modest duplex with a music room on the second floor. It had a piano.
Spring came and the whole city began to thaw and crawl with new life. It wasn’t a pleasant sort of spring, not like the ones Joshua remembered back in Berlin where the linden would begin to show shades of light green and the pavement would moss over with boisterous weeds searching for their place in the world, this was a savage spring. It bloomed like a festering onion awakening new smells and a whole faction of dormant populace. What was too much trouble to be done in the chill of winter was now exercised with vigor. The volume on the already congested streets seemed to double in both beauty and depravity, till it was stretched to its absolute limit. And summer hadn’t even arrived yet, the prospect of which was exhausting.

Joshua carved out his snake path. From the conservatory in the morning and early afternoon, to his music room in the late afternoon to early evening, he was a creature of habit, composing to keep his sanity, and working to sustain his replacement family in his replacement city.

As the days crept on, he began to notice how the sad patterns of his most primal human self had duplicated those of his former existence. He saw himself as animalistic in these moments and would draw comparisons in exercises of self-torture. Their home in Shanghai had become his old home in Berlin. The Conservatory, his Oper Haus, Max was with him still, which was of some comfort, and Madame Butterfly an antique stone around his neck as perfect and flawed as one of her ash covered jewels. His composing ultimately failed, but attempted, to fill the place left by Hanna. He credited it at around three percent. It gave him three percent of the joy she had given him, which was more than most people experience in a lifetime. Damn the knowing, he would think. A man who never had her would be happy here. He would be a king. But the rest of him, that ninety-seven percent, was empty, echoing with ghosts of the imaginary past and littered with the chaos that was this acrimonious city. He didn’t know what the word Shanghai meant, if it even meant anything, but in his mind it had to do with choking, or something you look at that is so busy and bright it renders you blind.

It wasn’t only his life that was stuck on a loop of predictability, his thoughts were repeating too. He was convinced that they were slowly poisoning him. Often he would think about all the things he could be thinking about and chastise himself for not thinking about them. He wanted to read books but couldn’t. He wanted to go for long walks, to see the sights. Wasn’t there a Great Wall? A Golden Temple? He wanted to see these things, he wanted to want to, but his thoughts were so sure of themselves that he was crushed under their weighty trajectory.

He was losing his hair. Not in totality, but in patches. He found a bald spot the size of a medium sized coin just behind his left ear. He spent three nights studying it by holding a mirror up to another mirror aimed at the back of his head. It was disturbing. He wanted to tell Hanna about it. She would know what to do. She would tell him it was nothing, that he was under a lot of pressure and that he needed to relax. She would lead him by the hand out of the music room and show him nature, either in a vase, or out a window, or on the street. If it got worse she would take him to the country, she would make him forget. But that’s what she did. Without her he was stuck in the daily patterns laid out for him by some bizarre inner, hair stealing, troll. There was no escape; the trenches he’d tread himself were too deep. He couldn’t climb out. He looked forward to sleep, which softened his fear of death, which in turn, terrified him. If only he could up and move, maybe to somewhere exotic, like, oh, China. Then he would laugh, a lonely empty laugh that would echo off the walls of the space inside him reminding him just how big a space it was.

But from a height, all of this meant nothing. From a height, Joshua was simply a predictable ant, moving around the city in his predictable way. BaiLan was a predictable ant, too. Her path shimmied up against his giving the two of them together the look of the number eight, or more romantically, the symbol for infinity. Still, they seldom intersected.

It was May at the time; by July they would be intertwined, and by September the eight would unravel into one radius. So, in the interest of progressing the whys and wherefores of events that developed out of these two circles, it would be prudent to focus our efforts on a slightly dramatized version of exactly how this happened.