Chapter 18

18.
“Madama Butterfly: Con onor muore: Puccini”

“What do you mean we have to move?” Frau Schmetterling had grown reasonably attached to the two-story flat, which had been their home for the past two years. “Move where?”

“Back to HongKew,” Joshua told her that night over dinner. “The place we started. I’ll have Max track down Anton. Perhaps we can get our old room back.”

But Frau Schmetterling would have none of it. She told Joshua in no uncertain terms that she was done with moving. That she was too old. If they wanted her to move, they would just have to come round and shoot her, then they could move her wherever they liked. He expected a similar reaction from Max, when and if he ever saw him again.
XinSi had taken over the young man almost completely. He spoke almost exclusively Mandarin now and seemed annoyed by Joshua’s non-mastery of the language, as if speaking German with him was the very worst of bores. His whole demeanor had shifted as well. He was no longer the wild, flaxen haired boy tripping along behind his Maestro, he was eighteen, and his edges had been polished to a slick and slippery shine. He spent his nights in pursuit of vice.

This transition was gradual. When Joshua thought about Max, in much the way a parent regards a child, he would ask himself where the time went. He wasn’t sure if he had driven Max away by spending so much time with BaiLan or if he had started spending time with BaiLan after Max began drifting away. He had been meaning to make a point of reconnecting with his apprentice before the recent unpleasantness, and now that they were once again thrust in the path of a storm, he took a bit of solace in the fact that Max would be by his side again, perhaps, he thought, it might not be too late to get him back.

When the news of the attack reached Max’s ears, he was too far gone to think much of it. XinSi had begun frequenting parlors known for their pitch-black hallways, the scent of opium emanating from darkened doorways, absinthe flowing from their dirty corners, their floors littered with bodies in various states of consciousness. It was in one of these remote, subterranean spots that Max was lounging on the night in question and it was there that he was told about the events of Pearl Harbor, a place so distant he could only fathom it in the abstract, the drugs painting elaborate pictures in his mind, pictures of explosions that touched the clouds an burnt everything in sight. He remained still as he listened, and it was only when the unseen hands connected to the voice illuminated their faces with a lone match, did he realize that he was being spoken to in German.

At first, the face pouring forth the information had seemed like it was perhaps the product of a distant radio transmission, but once it began to take form in the light of the small flame, cautiously approaching a cigarette, he was overwhelmed by a powerful pang of recognition. The man in the dark wore a brown shirt with a familiar black and red spider wrapped tightly around his intimidating bicep. He was a German. He was a soldier.

But Max was far away. Stretched out on a filthy floor mat and propped up on bags of stale rice, he felt contained inside his body, pickled like one of his curiosities. He suspected he was incased in glass, his mind floating helplessly in brine, his exterior, a hard, impermeable shell. So even though a distant part of him was violently shaken by what was before him, he was unable to react to it. He was a prisoner of circumstance, his only recourse to listen to this man and hold his image as tightly as he could before the match fizzled away leaving them both in darkness.
“It’s the strangest thing,” the soldier said as the match died, “for a moment it looked as thought your eyes were blue. It must be the drug.”

“It must be the drug,” Max repeated.

“Are you sure you’re not German?” the soldier asked, settling a large paw of a hand on Max’s leg.

Max had told him, as he was accustomed to telling just about anyone who asked these days, that his name was XinSi and that he was from Beijing.

“How does a man such as yourself come to speak German like a native?” But Max didn’t answer him. He was too wrapped up in the odd sensation of being touched. All his attention was on the hand that moved up his glass thigh and came to rest on his glass manhood, which reacted in kind with no help from the Max suspended helplessly inside himself.

“I want another look.” The soldier released his grasp just long enough to fumble for his matches. When the small flame flared and coned off, Max squinted, gazing past the tiny fire into the face of his tormenter. The man may as well have been Bruno Pesch. He would have sworn that he was, had it not been for the drugs and the all out impossibility of Bruno stumbling upon him in a Chinese Opium den so secluded you needed a map to find it. This was a place too remote for even the most adventurous of tourists, which got Max to thinking that the man himself might be a hallucination. And if that were the case, whose hand was groping him and who held the match?

“Who are you?” Max’s whispers made the flame flicker.

“Not fair, blue eyes, I asked you first,” the soldier said, as he moved closer. It was clear to Max what he wanted and though he knew he should try to fight him off, he lacked the mental and physical strength. He was caught in an undertow, at the mercy--for the second time in his life--of a Nazi with a match.

“Are you going to fight me, liebes?” The soldier asked after Max had swatted at his hand with the energy and speed of a small turtle.

“I just want to know who you are.”

The soldier laughed. “I have no more intention of telling you my name than you do of telling me yours.”

When the match went out, the soldier stretched out beside Max and continued to physically manipulate his person. The boy in the jar was trapped, banging on the glass from the inside. “Tell me who you are,” he panted, “are you Bruno Pesch?”

But the soldier no longer cared. He was past the point of words. Max, in his drug induced haze, was by this point fully convinced that the brown shirt skillfully molesting him was Bruno Pesch. That by some strange accident of fate, he had been deployed to Shanghai and ended up in its darkest of corners for the same reasons Max himself was there. For the activities they were at the moment engaging in. But if that were the case, if Bruno was ein Homosexueller then that changed everything.

Max remembered how disgusted Bruno was when he made a pass at him that fateful day in the café. But was it disgust? If Bruno thought that Max was mocking him, that he was the victim, once again, of Max’s cruelty, then the pass would have made him angry. Angry enough to pay an early visit to the Streng home. Angry enough to exact his revenge, then camouflage the crime within the sad chaos of Kristallnacht. A drug addled fantasy to be sure, but on that night it was as real for Max as if he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

He pictured Bruno going to the house, Hanna letting him in, they would have talked—she would have been kind—and when she turned her back…

Max felt a wave of sobriety wash over him and before he knew it he was on his feet grappling for the door. The soldier tried to pull him back down, but Max’s determination willed him forward. The realization caused such an internal tremor that it was enough to push the jar of pickled Max off the edge of the table where it smashed to the floor setting the boy free.

Outside, day was rapidly approaching. And by the time Max dragged his body home it was mid-morning.

Maestro was in the living room staring at the furniture and Frau Schmetterling could be heard pacing in the kitchen. Max floated in like a ghost and went straight for his bedroom. He needed to sleep. He needed to get his mind back and his strength up before processing his realization. But unfortunately his presence didn’t go unnoticed.

“Max,” Maestro’s eyes were red rimmed and tired, “thank God.”

For a split second Max thought that Maestro must have known. That perhaps he too had pieced together the truth of Hanna’s murder, and that he was going to forgive him for being its catalyst.

“Maestro…”

“Get packed. Then I’m going to need your help tracking Anton down.”

“Anton?”

Joshua looked at his young apprentice. Besides the clothes and the hair, which were disturbing enough, the boy looked drawn, deflated, like an alley cat recently rescued from a well. He blamed himself.

“Maxala, please. I need your help. I need you to pull yourself together, for The Butterfly, can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that.” Max grabbed the doorframe for support. “What’s going on?”

“You didn’t hear? Where have you been? No, never mind, I don’t want to know.” Joshua turned back to the furniture.

“Maestro…”

“It would seem the war has caught up with us. We are stateless persons and must report to HongKew. They’re detaining all foreigners.”

“What about the Conservatory? Can’t you speak to them, get a pass or something?”

“I’m not running from this, Max. I ran in Berlin and it cost me my life. I won’t run here.”

He seemed so heroic. Max knew it would be selfish of him to bring up Hanna during such a difficult time, so he swallowed his own poison and embarked on a mission of denial.
The rest of the day was spent packing and attempting to secure some sort of lodging in HongKew, the small geographical prison with no walls, was no doubt filling up quick. It was overrun to begin with, and due to the new decree, its population was about to double. There was no time to lose.

BaiLan came round that night expecting to find Joshua distraught, but instead she found him almost cheerful. He dropped what he was doing, a detailed survey of the living room furniture, and led her enthusiastically upstairs to the music room where he had a brand new composition laid out on their stands ready to be played.

“I wrote it for the couple in the synagogue. It’s for piano and cello,” Joshua said as he sat eagerly in front of the keys and waited for her to take her seat behind her cello.

“We must discuss, Joshua, perhaps there is a way, my father, or the dean. We could say you are a necessary part of society. We could get them to give you a pass. They have passes, no?” BaiLan stood behind him, still too shy to put her hands on his shoulders, which is what she desperately wanted to do.

Joshua’s eyes found the floor. “LanLan, it is our last night with the piano. Play with me?”

Downstairs, Max, fresh from the bath, shivered in his room as the drugs battled their way out of his system. Every part of him felt used up, taxed to the core. Tired of XinSi, he dressed in his western clothes, small for his growing frame, and skipped the wax, letting his hair curl the way nature intended. He thought of Maestro, so content with Miss Bai he was this healing wound and Max was an open sore. He cried into his pillow that night. He cried for himself.

Frau Schmetterling heard him and came in. She sat beside him on the bed and stroked his hair with a gloved hand. “I told Joshua they would have to shoot me to get me to leave Berlin.” She had been convinced for some months they were back in Germany. “I say let them come. We shouldn’t fear death, my boy. Once I’m out of my body, you couldn’t pay me a king’s ransom to get me back in.”

Max closed his eyes and imagined himself looking down the barrel of Bruno Pesch’s pistol. He had hoped his theory was a product only of the opium and once sober, it would no longer hold water. But a feeling in his gut told him it was true. To prove it, it would have to be spoken, he needed to form the words and say them out loud. He needed an impartial witness.

“Madame Butterfly, it’s all my fault.”

“What is my boy?”

“Hanna dying.” Max choked on the words. It was true. He knew it was. He saw the house in Berlin, all of its curtains open, looking through him. That wasn’t the work of looting Nazis, it was far too personal, too intimate.

“My Leonard died. I carried his ashes all the way to China in a small box. Do you know what else was in that box?”

“Jewelry?”

Frau Schmetterling looked shocked. “I told you this story. You know who Beethoven is, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you ask them to play me something by Beethoven?”

Max helped Frau Schmetterling up the narrow staircase into the music room. Joshua and BaiLan sat side by side immersed in a simple piano duet, but when they saw Frau Schmetterling they took up their strings. It was seven o’clock, she would request Beethoven everyday around this hour, and with wide eyes she would listen as if hearing it for the very first time. On that evening, the last one of its kind, each of the players privately wished for the gift of senility, not so much for Beethoven’s sake, but for their own.