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.