Chapter 25

25.
“Fantasia In C, "Wanderer" Adagio: Schubert”


It was raining violently the evening that BaiLan showed up on the doorstep of Dean Chen, a thick syrupy rain that fell to the ground in fist sized drops out of a purple sky. All the withered Dean saw when he opened the door was a figure slumped and soaked like a wet rat after a showdown with a broom, and then from the shadow, a small oval face with bloodshot eyes like garnets. He didn’t recognize her at first. She had gotten painfully thin in the year and a half since he’d seen her, and her hair was different. She had cut it. Cropped it into a bob that was plastered to the sides of her face. She was shivering--no wonder--he thought, she wasn’t wearing a coat, she was soaking wet, and in the lamplight, when she stepped into it, he was able to make out a series of bruises that began on her neck and traveled down the length of her back fading out of sight beneath her thin shawl. He adjusted his spectacles and squinted.

“BaiLan?” he whispered. She fell into his arms.

The Chen family were nothing if not charitable and didn’t think twice about taking Miss Bai in and nursing her back to health. They refrained from questions, making sure that above all she was comfortable, and though she was grateful for their kindness, BaiLan didn’t speak more than a few words during the first week of her stay. Mrs. Chen had to employ a host of different sneaky tactics to try and persuade her to eat, and did her best to hold her tongue as she treated the marks that covered the girl’s back.
When BaiLan was feeling stronger she mustered the courage to ask Dean Chen if he knew the whereabouts of Maestro Streng, and the ever-earnest Dean had no choice but to tell the truth, he hadn’t seen Joshua since the Japanese surrendered. Then as far as he knew, both he and Max fled Shanghai.

“All the westerners are gone. Many of them took ships to America. California, they say. Others went back to Europe. Not that I blame them. Their war is over, ours continues. Ours never ends.”

After receiving this blow, BaiLan stopped eating all together and refused to get out of bed. She was plagued by violent dreams of being chased, occasionally taking refuge in the closet or under the bed while still wrapped in her nightmare. She would wake not knowing where she was. It was disconcerting not only to BaiLan but to whoever found her, claws curled in a corner like a scared cat. She requested that all the windows and door be locked tight when she slept, as she had developed a fear of wandering away. She begged the Chen family not tell anyone that she was there. To keep her a secret while she waited for Maestro Streng to come for her.

After several weeks, Mrs. Chen began to get nervous regarding their houseguest and shared her concerns with her husband over dinner, a third of which would end up in the trash. What if BaiLan was a fugitive? What if by harboring her they risked being implicated themselves in what ever the girl had gotten herself involved in? Chen promised his wife that he would have a talk with Miss Bai as soon as she was feeling better, but as the days past she seemed only to deteriorate. They feared the worst, that she had lost the will to live, and not able to accept her blood on his hands, Dean Chen implored her.

“I care for you as if you were one of my own children,” he told her. “I watched you grow up, I saw you develop into a brilliant young musician…” And on and on like this for a long while, then he said, “I need you to tell me what happened to you so I can help.” He asked, “are you in trouble with the authorities? Have you done something you think cannot be undone? Because much can be undone, LanLan.”

She wanted to tell him. She really did. But there was too much stopping her. An aneurism of history blocking up the words, making them impossible to say. How could she tell this man, one who had known her since childhood, of the horrible indignities she had been forced to suffer as penance for her love? It was the old pride rearing its ugly head again. It was the pristine BaiLan, the virginal statue; the apple of her parent’s eye. If she told Dean Chen all that had happened, all the repugnant, deplorable things HongWei had done in the name of her salvation, she would never be able to look him in the eye again. As she saw it, BaiLan had two choices, she could die or she could leave. And since Dean Chen expressed passionate disapproval to the former, she felt she owed it to him to go on living, after all he had nearly saved her life. Only one question remained; where would she go?

“I can get you a commission in Harbin. There is a school and they are in need of a music teacher. It’s as far from Hong Kong as I could manage. I hope you like the cold.” Dean Chen forced a smile and scratched the back of his head.

“I don’t mind it.”

“You don’t know. You haven’t felt cold till you’ve experienced a Manchurian winter. It freezes the marrow in your bones.”

“It’s far way. That’s all that matters.”

“What about your parents? If they come looking for you should I tell them where you--”

BaiLan’s face lost what little color it still had.

“No. Please. No one is to know,” she sank to her knees before the Dean in a dramatic gesture of desperation.

“Please, Dean Chen, there is only one person in the world who can know where I’ve gone. Maestro Streng. Everyone else, believe me when I tell you that they no longer have my best interests in mind.”

The soft-spoken Dean placed a hand on her shoulder. She attempted to play off the flinch his touch evoked with a grin. “You have my word,” he offered a hand and lifted her to her feet. “Now, enough of this foolishness. If you want the commission there is much work to be done. We will eat, you must fatten up for the Harbin winter, and then, I have been working on a new piece by Schubert that I’d like your opinion on.”

A week later, BaiLan was on a train heading north to Beijing where she would catch her train to Harbin. The scenery that speed past her window was breathtaking, but she didn’t notice. BaiLan didn’t notice much anymore, preoccupied as she was, with memories she had painstakingly edited into a newsreel of highlights. It started with Joshua. Their walks, playing Beethoven for Madame Butterfly, the day he embraced her in that darkened hallway in HongKew, but it always ended with HongWei. Even when she tried to direct the flow of her thoughts, they would get the better of her and boil down to the bitter and crass question that began it all.

“How many times were you with him?”

He would ask her this constantly. For the first time in the car after he had abducted her and every day after. When she refused to answer he would put it to her during their atonement sessions, and eventually, with the help of a cane, he coaxed a number out of her.

She said thirteen, a lie only the naive HongWei would believe. In the end she would see the error in this. She should have told him the truth, perhaps then he would have written her off, intimidated beyond all repair. Either that or she should have convinced him she had retained her virtue, it was not an impossible thing to fake. Women had been known to do it quite convincingly with a small vile of pig’s blood carefully palmed on the wedding night. But by giving him a number that was so attainably low, made the relationship she had with Joshua seem little more than casual to HongWei. This only increased his frustration with BaiLan and his hatred of Streng who must have known of her affection towards him and used it as a way to relieve himself on thirteen different occasions. He had used her, and she was too much in love to see that. But at HongWei’s core he couldn’t totally blame her for her weak feminine heart, he still felt she was redeemable.

As for her parents, they knew nothing of what was happening under their noses, or if they did, their eyes were closed. She had embraced her father when HongWei brought her back. She begged him to let her return to Shanghai, but he only frowned. “You tried, LanLan, but it is time to resume your family duties.” Her father looked through her, they all did. Except HongWei. It was as if an arrangement had been made in her absence, one that gave him total control over her person if her were able to bring her back. As time passed, BaiLan began to see that HongWei’s reign extended over the whole family. He and his brothers patrolled that apartment as if it were one of their military posts. Constantly questioning, taking stock of who left and when.
BaiLan wasn’t allowed out of the flat unless accompanied by one of them, usually a brother, for a trip to the park or to the market to shop for the inevitable wedding. Then, once a week, HongWei would come for her and drag her, sometimes kicking and screaming, to his flat down the road, where she would be subjected to hours of torture as he racked his brain trying to come up with a suitable punishment, one that would purify her for marriage.

He give her mindless tasks to repeat in cycles of thirteen while chanting humiliating mantras of apology. He tried beating her. Thirteen strokes at a time, but it wasn’t enough. He cut her hair but he still didn’t feel vindicated. This went on for weeks until he eventually came to the only conclusion that would make things truly square in his mind.

The key was thirteen. Everything came down to that one number. It was what he saw when he looked at her. Even as he beat her he was unable to wipe the number from his mind, or erase the picture of her copulating with the ugly westerner. Thirteen stairs to their apartment, thirteen buttons on her dress as he undid them with shaking hands to reveal her white back. Sometimes the ghost of thirteen cane marks from the week prior. Nothing he did could separate her from the number. Even if she was lying, which he suspected she was, it was the number she had given him and therefore the only one he had. He wanted to erase the number to subtract it forever but since he couldn’t he decided on a system of negation. He explained it to her in detail.

“I can’t marry you like this, BaiLan,” he told her as he paced floor around the chair to which she clung, “I have gone over it in my mind many times but it is no good. You have put things out of balance, BaiLan. By letting that violinist violate you, you have made it impossible for me to ever accept you as a wife.”

“I don’t want to be your wife,” BaiLan said through gritted teeth, but HongWei had stopped listening to her months ago, she was hardly in the room. It was only him and his blinding insecurity.

“We must even the score, BaiLan. Only then will I be able to respect you.”

“I don’t want your respect.”

“It will be like,” he searched for the word, “a ritual. I don’t intend to look at you when I do it. I won’t touch you with my hands. It will be a loveless act, like it was for your beloved Maestro. Then, when we are even, we shall be married and I will embrace you as a wife. On that day we will both know what it really means to love.”

“I will never love you.”

This HongWei heard and turned on her like a tiger. “You only say that because you are still under his spell. All the more reason why what I suggest is necessary.”

That was how it began. A systematic series of rapes to make things even in the eyes of her intended. HongWei had it figured to the letter. His brothers would be present as witnesses and to restrain his lovely fiancée if she was in a struggling mood. It would be quick and clean--always the former, seldom the latter--as BaiLan fought him every time.

It wasn’t so much the act itself, which was less horrible than it was unpleasant, nor was it the humiliation of having his leering brothers there, pretending to look away as they held down her arms, while he did his pathetic business below the folds of her dress. No, the worst part about it was that it was working exactly the way HongWei had planned. Every time he forced himself on her, he would force out a little of the memory she had of Joshua, till an act that had once been only a source of good memories became a tainted with violence and revenge.

It wasn’t long before HongWei’s formality began to melt in the heat of his passion. Soon he had started creeping into her bedroom at night and pinning her down, breathing heavily into her ear. She would have screamed, but she knew she would not survive the shame that would come if her parents were to find out. His precious number thirteen came and went, as did the ritualistic aspect of the assaults as he began to come to her daily getting lost in obsessive protestations. He couldn’t stop himself, he said. He thought about her constantly it was affecting his work. He said he loved her, he needed to be near her, inside her, now, always, again. He wanted to make love to her, to caress her, to kiss her, to be naked with her, and asked if she felt it too. How could she not?

It was his love more than all the rest of it that pushed BaiLan to her breaking point. Even if it meant loosing her family, she could not endure it and its sticky realities any longer.

She made her escape during a shopping trip with the brothers, slipping out of a store while their backs were turned. She had no money, no clothes except the ones on her back, but she ran. She ran and didn’t look back till she made it to Shanghai, half-expecting to see HongWei at her heels when she finally turned to check for him that rainy night on Dean Chen’s porch, the sky the color of a rotten plum or a black eye.

Harbin is a city of unparalleled beauty in every season but it is in winter that she really comes into her own. Like a beautiful girl who stays silent until the cold descends, then opens her mouth to sings like an angel. Harbin’s angels were carved out of ice, as was everything else during the winter months. An entire parallel city built to rival the existing non-transparent one. It sparkled into existence as soon as the first frost descended, block-by-block, angel-by-angel, flower-by-flower and bird-by-bird. By whatever the ice-sculptors, professional and non-professional could dream up.

She boasted ice archways and ice columns thirty feet high, ice alters, ice gardens, ice rinks, ice animals, ice children, ice to eat flavored with colored sugar. Ice hotels with ice beds and ice furniture. Ice restaurants with cold food served on plates made of ice. Ice forests, ice fortresses, and ice mazes lit in a kaleidoscope of colors. Irreverent candleholders made of ice clung to brave ice walls—oh, how they tempted fate!

It was this sensory feast that greeted Joshua in the winter of ’49 when he first set foot in the grand northern city. It was such a shocking change from the warm, wet mud and saturated greenery of Taiwan that it shredded his senses to the point of euphoria.
The frost settled in his beard and he loosened the strings on both The Lion and his ehru to prevent stress. When he lost his footing and slipped, for the first time of many slips to follow, he broke out into a great rolling laugh, one that prompted children in red caps and ice skates to come rescue him as if they were part of some obscure branch of the Red Cross reserved for ice festivals of inordinate size.

It was a winter wonderland like no other and it pleased him. To be bundled against the cold made him feel alive, sharp, and energized. He who had grown used to the weight of humidity, the lethargy of heat, the oppression of sunlight, it felt as if he had been set free, like a spark leaping gleefully from a fire. He was excited too, for he was told that this was the city where he would find BaiLan.

When Joshua showed up on the steps of the Chen house it was a scene comically similar to the one two years earlier that had revealed BaiLan. It was raining, great hulking drops against a gray and crimson sky, and Joshua was wet. He didn’t have more than a threadbare coat covering him and he looked thin. Still, it didn’t take Dean Chen a minute to realize it was him, Joshua would forever stand out against any Chinese backdrop like a giraffe attempting to blend in with heard of horses.

“We had very nearly given up on you,” the old man said, cleaning his spectacles. Then he smiled and welcomed Joshua in. Mrs. Chen cooked and over dinner he told them his story. They were truly amazed and saddened by it for it seemed the young man had been through so much in his short life. They knew, you see, more about the atrocities coming to light in Europe than Joshua did having been on the island for two years. They knew what had happened to his wife and had nothing good to report about BaiLan. Their end of the tale was not easy to relate since they didn’t want to add to his burden with another series of unanswered questions, still they had honored BaiLan with the truth as they knew it and would do the same for Maestro Streng. In the end he was grateful. They knew where she was, just as he suspected they would.

Unlike BaiLan, Joshua didn’t stay on at the Chen’s for very long. He was out the door the following day with his nose pointed northward in search of BaiLan and a way out of China with her on his arm. He decided that they had suffered enough. Unfortunately it was not a decision he was qualified to make. He knew this, but hoped for the best, as if positive thought could somehow influence fate.

For the record, it cannot.

It didn’t take him long to find her. He slipped and slid his way to the school where he was told she worked and walked right in. It was Sunday, but something told him that he would find her there.

BaiLan had always been obsessive when it came to practicing. He recalled a story she had told him about her childhood. A fantasy of waking up in a room that had in it nothing but her cello and piles upon piles of sheet music. If she broke a string or got hungry, the things she needed would be slipped to her through a small opening in the wall, but beyond that it was to be pure solitude. She wanted to be imprisoned with her instrument, to perfect every piece of music ever written for the cello, and have all the time in the world to do it.

On that snowy day--it had started to snow as Joshua made his way to the school--BaiLan was not engaged in the cello but gazing out of the window as one of her pupils practiced his Mozart at the piano.

Reflected in her eyes flakes as big as feathers landed softly on the ice menagerie her students had been raising since late November. She had her arms crossed against her chest and she wore a red sweater, the only color in the room. Her hair was short which made the viewing of her shoulders infinitely less complicated. When the boy came to the end of his piece, BaiLan whispered, “Wieder.”

“I’m sorry, teacher?” the child asked, having heard but not understood his mistress.
“Again,” Joshua instructed from the doorway where he had been standing.

BaiLan turned as if the word was a bullet fired from the past into her heart. Moving so quickly that she nearly left her shoes behind her, she ran to him and tackled his chest with the force of a giant magnet or a thousand speeding flowers.

“Mien Blume,” He whispered.

She said nothing, she couldn’t, she only held him and wept.

The student at the piano watched the scene with a slack jaw till Joshua instructed him to play his piece again. And play it he did, three times before BaiLan released her grip. When she released him she wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wouldn’t vanish into a cloud of steam or even worse end up being the janitor. She looked into Joshua’s face with wonder as if doing so, would heal her every wound.

BaiLan dismissed her pupil without breaking her gaze and asked the question that had been part of her for over three years.

“Where have you been?”

That afternoon the reunited lovers walked slowly through the ice city arm in arm. It had been so long since their walks in Shanghai but they fell into step together as if perhaps only a few days had passed. For a long while they were silent, watching a gaggle of children in red scarves make figure eights around an ice statue of Chairman Mao wearing its own, slightly larger, red scarf made form paper. Then finally, Joshua spoke.

“Can you forgive me, LanLan?”

She answered his question with one of her own.

“Can you forgive me?”

“For what? I’m the one who failed you.”

“You didn’t fail me. You’re here. And I don’t care what kept you. I am certain that you got here as soon as was humanly possible.”

Joshua thought of his Taiwanese meditation sessions and his heart sizzled with guilt. He could have gotten to her sooner if he tried, but now was not the time to be confessing such things, he would keep it from her to spare her feelings, for wasn’t he happy just to be with her now?

“I got here as soon as I could,” he told her, for anything else would have been barbaric.

As they walked on further through the ice city, BaiLan opened up like a clam upon contact with boiling water. She told him about her school, about her students--some of who showed real promise, she shared everything that was positive and beautiful about her life, leaving out the past, leaving out HongWei. Joshua wasn’t the only one concerned with sparing feelings. But for BaiLan it went even deeper than that. She had spent the past two years trying to forget what had happened to her, if it remained unspoken it remained powerless. She had no intention of ever telling Joshua, or anyone about HongWei. She would focus only on the good.

Soon they came upon BaiLan’s favorite attraction, The Crystal Maze. She had been through it several times already, but promised Joshua that he could decide on all the turns without any help from her. They bought two tickets from the old man who hurried them along.

“No dilly-dallying, I want to go home.” BaiLan lowered the fur-collar of her coat to smile at him, and he waved a finger of recognition. “You know this maze, make it quick.”

She insisted on going through in her ice skates, which had Joshua enthralled. Citizens of Harbin all owned ice skates. Retractable ones were installed at birth, laying in wait during the useless summer months like un-switched switchblades, till the ice came to release their trigger and set their shiny blades free. BaiLan was the perfect candidate for the things, long limbed and graceful. Joshua shuffled along behind her clinging to the ice wall like a toddler moments before taking his first steps and handicapped as he was, he too felt set free. The cold, the dizzying cold, it made his body heat up like a baked potato inside of his coat, while his extremities froze, his cheeks burned and his head throbbed. He grabbed his swan and pinned her back to the icy wall.

“I love it here, it makes me feel alive.” Then he reached into the folds of her coat and ran his hands up the small of her back to where her skirt ended and her red sweater began. His cold hands made contact with her baked potato skin, which was most certainly of the sweet or fingerling variety, and she let out a high-pitched cry that cut Joshua to the loins.

Suddenly the prospect of making love to her there, on the ice seemed like the best idea anyone had ever had. The glorious heat combined with the freezing cold would be an experiment in extremity he wasn’t willing to pass up, so he kissed her to smother her cries, and with their mouths joined he threw off his coat and let it fall to the ground.

He searched for more flesh by way of the zipper that held up her skirt and let it fall to her knees. But his present would not be opened so easily. There were her wool stockings to contend with, which he decided to will off of her, applying pressure skillfully to key areas above them till they magically came down on their own. A moment later after a tinkling of icy fingers worked at his worn belt buckle he felt himself exposed to the elements--first relief, then cold, then with a gentle push, the fiery inferno of Hades itself wrapping around him and holding on for dear life.
It was in this conjoined manner that they fell to the ice, he couldn’t secure the footing to do to her what was so direly necessary by that point with out slipping comically away like a pornographic Charlie Chaplin, so they relocated to the ice each in turn experiencing the simultaneously wicked and soothing feeling of it burning their bare skin.

Everything was hot, even the ice, which had begun to melt beneath them till their bodies sloshes in a tepid wading pool. With the moisture making him seasick, and her tears burning his lips, the current inside of him broke and crashed into her like a sub-marine lava flow. Three years were the words that appeared above the scale, repeating with no rest between them. Three years, as he pressed into her, giving her everything he had, most of which collected in the oyster shell they had left in the ice, the concave hole of love in which she sat, legs spread in the collecting murk. It seemed yellow against the pristine white of the snow, the way the teeth of a Geisha do when she is in the white face of her trade. He pictured it re-freezing when they had long gone. His essence left behind to be trod and skated upon by winter revelers, till spring of course when his children would go to their graves in mud.

He stayed inside of her until it became painful and then stayed longer. It was this quietly chaotic moment that she usually reserved for her own climax. On the mattress in Shanghai she had explained that his willingness to suffer was what put her over the edge, she had said it in jest, but there was no getting past its truth. That day he intended to suffer inside of her until his balls froze.

But there was no sound from BaiLan. No moans as her hips manipulated his recent gift of Geisha teeth tinted, illuminated lubrication. She was stone, and her eyes teared, not from the cold as his did, but from some internal source. They didn’t meet his either. Her head was turned and cast down. Everything about her body language pulled away from him until he had no choice but to pull away from her.

“LanLan, what’s wrong?” Her skin began to turn blue. “Besides the obvious, LanLan?” He tried to laugh as he used his coat to dry her, as he pulled her stockings back up around her doll’s hips, as he refastened her skirt and closed her coat all of this with his own pants still around his knees. He made a crass joke about frozen bratwurst. But she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Did I hurt you? LanLan tell me what’s wrong.”

Eventually, she blubbered an excuse about being overwhelmed with emotion, and part of her believed it too. Part of her believed that HongWei had nothing to do with the equation. But as the days past, tension grew between the newly reunited couple, so much so, that it had Joshua questioning his northward journey altogether.

First off, she wouldn’t let him touch her; even handholding had her pulling away. She was far more impatient than he remembered and seemed to be easily irritated by trivial things, like the state of the bathroom or a dirty bowl left out overnight. She had all but quit the cello; she didn’t even have one in her home--a tiny pair of rooms allocated to her by the school. And that was a whole other problem. She was breaking the rules by allowing Joshua to stay with her. Teachers weren’t allowed to have long-term houseguests as it was considered to be morally questionable by the powers that be. This was a source of constant worry for BaiLan, who would clam up and not speak when Joshua suggested that they simply find other lodging, or even better, leave China. Move to Europe, America, Argentina, anywhere but there.

He wanted to conduct again, to compose, to travel, and her ludicrous response to this was that she had to think of her students. It’s not that Joshua didn’t understand, but really, they had been through so much. It was almost as if she were trying to drive him away on purpose.

The night Joshua left, they had had a terrible fight. The headmaster of the school found out he’d living in her quarters and gave them a three-day ultimatum. BaiLan’s brilliant suggestion was that Joshua find his own lodging nearby and visit with her from time to time. Her words delivered a sting he could not recover from.

“Things have changed,” she said, then closed her bedroom door and wept the entire night away.

Joshua listened for several hours. He wondered what she was crying about? After all, she was the one ending it. Women do that, or so he had heard. Remove the love and there is still emotion, still the pain of loss, still an overwhelming sense of guilt at being the one bringing down the axe, so in essence, she was crying for herself and he knew if he stayed in Harbin, he would only make it worse. Leaving, even though it killed him, was his silent act of mercy.

Maybe it was the drunken daze of war that had kept them together all those years, maybe Max was right all along, maybe she was just a substitute for Hanna, a fragile caged bird or a symbol of his pride.

Crushed, his only conciliation was that he would finally be able to shake off the giant red country, with its giant red nose, and head back to Europe where things made sense. “How different could it be?” was his last thought before gently closing the door to BaiLan’s flat.

She heard him go from the bed where she lay in a pit of sadness that she never thought existed. BaiLan would attempt to take her own life that night with a half-full bottle of benzine. But it wasn’t enough to kill her or the resilient child growing inside of her.