Chapter 21

21.
“Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 "New World"
II. Largo: Dvorák”

"The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus…” Joshua strained to find his words as BaiLan translated for the class. “A center point around which the work revolves. Even if that center point is as elusive as an image from a dream. Give it a center, give it a face, or a feeling, as long as it’s specific, and compose from there.”

A hand shot up in the rear of the large hall. BaiLan acknowledged it with her baton. The student went on for a while as Joshua shifted his weight from one bruised leg to the other.

“He’s being argumentative,” she whispered. “He wants to know if even a distressed mind can retain focus over the course of a composition. He sights Schumann’s insanity,” she made a face, “but he’s just trying to be smart.”

“Tell him that I look forward to hearing his first composition.”

She did and the class laughed shyly.

“Laugh. It’s okay.” But something had changed in his face. BaiLan saw it.

“Maestro?”

“I’m going to sit for a while. Would you mind leading them in the Dvorák?”

BaiLan dutifully stood and tapped her baton as Joshua limped to his small office. He shut the door and crumbled into an old leather couch, his bruises crying out in pain and relief.

It had been a week since the Japanese had beaten him within inches of doing permanent damage. And now he found himself sitting in his own windowed office at the Conservatory listening to a new group of Chinese students play a symphony written in America by a Bohemian; it was all rather surreal.

He thought of Dvorák as he sat there, and what it must have been like for him in Iowa where he composed his 9th Symphony. Joshua’s students couldn’t contemplate Iowa. Neither could he, truth be told, but he imagined it to be a sprawling place with field, after field of golden grain. A place that was dry, and warm, and endless. He imagined Dvorák as a fish out of water there, much the way Streng was in Shanghai. He smiled when he thought of the beauty that sometimes spills forth from the disorientation of the homesick traveler. Then he smiled because he was alive. His trials had taken nearly everything he loved, and with it, a good portion of his fears.
He watched as LanLan conducted the Largo; she could have been a ballet dancer. He couldn’t take his eyes from her shoulders and the place where they met the nape of her neck. He knew he would die to protect her, but these words didn’t hold the same weight that they once did. That’s not to say he didn’t love her, he did, but it was a different love then the love he had for Hanna.

Hanna had been his air supply, his sustenance, and he followed her around waiting for the crumbs to fall from her plate so he could greedily gobble them up. But no matter how many she let drop, it was never enough. So he bled for her, daily, like a primitive man making sacrifice to an ambivalent god. His love for Hanna was painful, it was devastating, and it was ultimately selfish.

But Miss Bai, it seemed she bled for him. And not in the vulgar brutish way a man does, spilling bloody passion in rivers down the neck and chest; but in pinpricks. In cicatrices. In beaded rows. In dainty ruby-colored droplets. A paper cut on the whitest of skin, barely enough to rouge the lips, but bubbling just below the surface of parchment-thin cheeks in the form of a blush. Her love for him made him feel, not like a sniveling crumb catcher, but like a warrior. And for a warrior, the willingness to die to protect a loved one is second nature; it’s void of romance, it is simply common sense.

He had met Kuboto like a warrior. And when the little man told him to kneel, he refused. Instead, he retrieved a chair from the wall and sat meeting the general’s eyes evenly. For this he was called arrogant. For this he was dragged to a dark room and beaten for what felt like hours. He lost consciousness, and when he regained it, he was beaten again. He had many thoughts that night but at no time was he really afraid. The thought that kept rising to the surface, the one he heard in his aching head louder than all the others was an exclamation of amazement. He’d never so much as thrown a punch in his whole life, let a lone been hit, and here he was receiving the beating of his life. Oh, it was awful, no mistaking that, but not as awful as his wild imagination suspected it would be. Just behind that thought was one of, to hell with it, for he knew he wouldn’t be alone on either end of the mortal coil. His main gripe was the cold. It was very cold in the room they had him in and he hated being cold.

Sometime later, it must have been the middle of the night, for things were as quiet as they get in the ghetto, he was taken from the room--and the cold, and his thoughts--to another room. It was very dark but he noticed the unmistakable silhouette of an upright piano. He was ushered towards it and told to stand on a line painted on the ground then warned not to cross it. The armed men guarding him took their places as sentinels by the door, and for a while, a long while, they all waited in the dark.
Joshua could barely imagine what was in store for him, but he was certainly concerned about the line on the ground as something about it conjured images of being on the less than fortunate side of a firing squad. If it wasn’t for the piano, he would have been convinced that they were simply waiting for orders, or for the executioner to show up, or worse.

After standing so long on battered knees caps, and with a head that felt like a frozen cantaloupe, he almost wished for death. But finally an entourage could be heard making it’s way down the hall. General Kuboto came in with a few of his senior guards. He was out of uniform and book-ended by two identical looking women, their faces painted white, their lips in crimson bows, with hair as black as ink, jingling with tiny wind chimes, their bodies draped in silk. They recoiled when they saw Joshua. Their eyes went wide and they giggled, taking pathetic refuge behind the tiny shield of Kuboto. It seemed they had all come from a party, he could smell the alcohol on all of them.
Kuboto reassured the women as if Joshua was a circus freak and he was his handler. “Terrifying, yes, but not dangerous,” his eyes seemed to say. But soon things began to make sense. One of the guards was summoned, and on command, produced a violin case that was opened and offered to Joshua. Not death, music.

In the lantern light he reached for it, becoming aware of his hands and the pain he was able to isolate below the numbing cold. How could he play if he couldn’t feel his fingers? His right hand had been stepped on earlier while the guard offering him the instrument had been fun-lovingly kicking him in the ribs, and he was sure suddenly, that at least one of his fingers was broken. Still, he thought, it’s better the right hand than the left. He took the bow.

The violin itself was neglected. He could tell almost by looking at it that it wasn’t close to being in tune, so he set to work, resting it’s cold varnish against his pummeled jaw, enjoying the coolness of it till it warmed to the temperature of something cooked medium rare and irritated his face sending shock waves of agony deep into his skull.

As he tuned, the Geishas were overcome with fits of laughter, they made sour faces and tickled Kuboto with their fans.

“You can’t play, refugee! You lie!” The general shouted.

Joshua stopped tuning and looked at him, he thought the tuning of the violin was his performance. Joshua tried to explain, but Kuboto cut him off.

“Kuboto, play. Refugee, follow.”

With a sweep of his robes, Kuboto sat down at the piano and began a melody Joshua wasn’t familiar with. It was definitely Japanese in origin and simple enough to be followed even as he completed his tuning. When the melody entered the chorus, the women began to sing as did Kuboto, and when the song ended, they insisted it be played again; six drunken times in total.

He silently congratulated their success, for unbeknownst to them, Kuboto and his women had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect torture device. If the Allies were made up of musicians, and this song, sung over and over again by two drunken women with voices like dying cats, were broadcast on the battlefields, their war would be won in a heartbeat, soldiers falling one by one, ears bleeding.

The general, who Joshua now hated on a whole new level, looked mighty pleased with himself. He gestured to Joshua and said in a language that wasn’t German, yet in tone so glaringly, and patronizingly universal, “See, THAT’S how it’s done.”

He had been beaten, he had been humiliated, and worst of all his ego had been assaulted. He could have let it go. But in his hands he held his weapon--handed to him by his enemy--loaded and ready to fire. Something violently self-destructive awoke in the deepest part of Joshua’s heart. What else could he do?

The little violin now christened in a thin layer of his blood had begun to warm to its new master’s hands, to tempt them. And when he brought the bow down on the strings so quickly and so violently it gave itself fully to him, like a lover or a slit throat, and suddenly there were two of them in the room with something to say. Joshua could hear his audiences necks snap to attention as they turned to look at him. He cut the bow again and with barely a breath between, he launched into the abyss.

The sounds that spat fourth into the face of the diminutive general and his whores, was as primal as the root of all music, yet as familiar as could be. Joshua executed a violent variation on the melody Kuboto had just played which, when they caught on to it, made the women squeal with delight. They tried to sing along, but Joshua was too fast for them, tossing in Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, familiar themes just for their amusement. The women were enthralled, their heads tinkling, their fans scraping, silk on silk. Even the guards were slack jawed.

When his little concert reached its crescendo, he took his time, deliberately stroking out the last few notes and holding them till they faded of their own accord and the room went silent again. The exhausted violin fell trembling and bloody to Joshua’s shoulder. And when it seemed to sigh and exanimate, the room sighed with it; the Geishas rather loudly with marked vulgarity. But Kuboto held up his hand.

I hope you enjoyed that, Joshua thought to himself convinced he had committed suicide by way of arrogance.

The little man regarded Joshua for sometime, and with a scratch of his nose, he nodded his head until what appeared on his face was unmistakably the shadow of a grin.

“You play good Japanese music,” he said. And with that, Kuboto lead the entire entourage out of the music room leaving him standing on the line still unsure of his fate.

The guards that had brought him in hadn’t budged from their places near the door, the only change was that he still held the violin, his fingers welded to the strings, the bow shaking in his bruised hand.

A lone set of footsteps could be heard approaching in the hall. The executioner? Of course. Kuboto wouldn’t have him killed in the presence of ladies. Joshua’s instinct was to go out playing, so he raised the violin again but he couldn’t think of a single melody that wasn’t the one he had just heard. To go to one’s death with such a tune spinning around in a bruised melon of a head, how tragic. But it was too late. The door opened and this time the young man who entered had the brilliant idea to switch on the light.

Joshua winced. At the door the soldier frowned at him. He must have looked like he just committed bloody murder with a violin bow. Fatigued by the light, and noticing the boy’s absence of a firearm, he set the violin down on the piano, giving it a little pat of gratitude, and attempted to quell the wave of nausea that washed over him.

The young soldier approached and handed him a blue piece of paper. It was a pass. Then he opened a door that Joshua hadn’t noticed before leading out onto the street. Without so much as a word, he turned off the lights and left the room followed by the guards closing the door behind him.

Outside in the early morning light, the snow was a lovely shade of indigo and with a sneaking feeling he just might be shot in the back before making it across the square, Joshua focused his mind on Miss Bai’s shoulders and began the frigid walk home.