But his cash was disappearing. He spared a few coins every Wednesday morning to get an early copy of the Shanghai Times on the day the new employment ads came out, but there were really no clubs left, at least not any that he could play in.
The Badlands, between Yuyuan and Jessfield and Great Western roads, could not even be considered. The Japanese had forced foreigners out of their mansions and then turned them into vice clubs, just as they had done with the Royal. They filled the ground floors with gambling tables and roulette wheels, constantly jammed with customers and patrolled by guards bristling with guns. Everything else was divided into curtained cubicles for smoking opium, or for sex. Thomas noticed the thick haze and the sweet-sick smell when he walked through midlevel places like the Celestial and the Good Friend. The smell hung in the air even at the top club, the Hollywood, a huge low-ceilinged labyrinth of drug dens and gambling halls into which ten thousand Shanghainese streamed every day and night, from motorcars and rickshaws that clogged the streets all around. But there was no serious music.
The rest of the city was unstable, even though the battle was well in the past. The resistance fighters and collaborationists were still attacking each other by bombing the offices of newspapers and magazines, and assassinating anyone who took too strong a position. One day in February, walking down Rue Chevalier, Thomas saw a human head hanging from a lamppost, eyes wide in terror, staring right at the Frenchtown police station. He could not read the note beneath it, but soon learned that it said “Look! Look! The result of anti-Japanese elements,” and that the head belonged to Cai Diaotou, who edited a society tabloid. Policemen who investigated the decapitation received human fingers in the mail, and soon other severed heads started appearing around Frenchtown, with warning notes. Still, he had to go out, to look for work, or he would starve.
He tried the pit orchestras at the theaters, film studios, and recording studios, and answered ads for rehearsal and accompanist work. He went to every open call for a piano player, and found them crowded with applicants, classically trained like him, many of them very high level, and all of them Jewish refugees.
He waited for his turn on a long bench next to a man from Vienna named Eugen Silverman. “We came on the Lloyd Triestino Line from Genoa,” Silverman said, “and for one whole month we could not leave the ship. Bombay, Singapore, Manila, Hong Kong-all the other passengers could come and go, not the Jews. It’s like a punishment from God. No country will take us. Not even for a few hours.”
“Except Shanghai,” said Thomas.
“Thanks to God. Even though they only let us leave with two hundred Reichsmarks, we are here.” Silverman’s name was called, and he went into the little room where they had heard the pianists play short excerpts, one by one.
His playing sounded exceptionally good to Thomas, bright and professional, and when he sight-read the selection they gave him-for every man was given two pages of some piece to test his reading-he played with assurance. Yet when he came out, his babyish face, with its soft round features and blond eyebrows, was long and gray.
“Truly?” Thomas said. “You sounded excellent.”
“Look what they have to choose from,” Silverman said, waving at the long line of pianists. He slumped back down in his seat, and even through his overcoat Thomas could see the hollowness in his upper chest, and the skin loosening beneath his chin, and in one of those intuitive instants he had come to trust, he knew the man had been going hungry.
“Thomas Greene?” said the woman in the doorway.
He gave Eugen a squeeze on the shoulder. “You’ll get the next job,” he said. “You play beautifully.”
Thomas did not do any better. When he was done, they crossed his name off and dismissed him.
To his surprise, Eugen Silverman was still outside, waiting. “No?” he guessed when he saw Thomas’s face. “Ach, they are looking for a God, not a man.” He stood and brushed at his overcoat, which Thomas saw was worn, and had been mended. I looked like that when I first came here. Now his clothes were handmade, of the finest cloth, but it meant nothing.
They left the studio and walked up Zhejiang Road toward the Grand Shanghai Hotel. “Come with me, Eugen. I know a street cart not far from here with very good noodle soup. I have a few coins. Let me buy you a bowl.”
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to-”
“Come,” Thomas said again. He led him north to Taiwan Road, until they came to a small corner between two buildings where great puffs of steam rose into the air and a huddled mob of hungry patrons crowded the small tables, all eating noodles. “Sit,” said Thomas, “it’s restorative.” And he paid the vendor for two bowls.
Song’s orders took her to Chen Lu Village, to learn from the peasants. There, the peasants were all ceramics artisans, because Chen Lu was a village that “ate pottery”-in addition to farming the terraces on the repeating hills, everyone worked in clay. Even the houses were made of discarded pots, from whole urns stacked up, to shards and tiles cemented together; some houses were even built in hive shapes, like kilns. People told her she was lucky to be sent there in winter. With all the kilns running, she would at least be warm. She tried to feel swept up in it, but it was not why she had come north. She longed to go to Yan’an.
As she set out in a bouncing, clattering flatbed truck with a group of students from Zhengzhou, she reminded herself that she needed improvement. The students put her to shame with their joy and fervor, and after all, the job they were going to do-dig a new set of terraces on land that had slid in the rains of the previous autumn-was worthwhile.
By the time they came within sight of the town, belching wood-fired kiln smoke into a hazy sky from a string of denuded hilltops, the winter sun was sinking, and the temperature plummeting. As hunger ate at them, they passed houses tantalizingly strung with corncobs, or fronted with tall heaps of drying kernels on the ground, their color leaching away in the fading light. The truck stopped in front of two hives at the top of one of the hills, and was gone almost as soon as they had clambered down, clapping and stamping, into the cold. The hives, one for men and one for women, were as dark and cold as the outdoors, but they soon had the hearths blazing and a minimal meal of mush made from boiling dried corn and millet. The next day, they would approach the locals for vegetables and oil and salt, maybe some pork. The women slept in a huddled row that night, and Song lay on her right side, warm and safe within the accordion-line of bodies. When she woke up the next morning, someone was singing.
It took only a few days to see that there was no man in the group she cared to know any better, and she was embarrassed for having even thought of it. She would return to Thomas when the time was right. Now she had to learn from the peasants.
She loved many things about Chen Lu Village, the way the sun rose red over the hills, as if lifted by the screaming of roosters; the perplexed gratitude of the older potters when the students restored their families’ grain fields; the warm feel of the women’s hive at night; and the faces of the students by firelight, singing the songs they had learned. It was always in choral style, always about “we” and “us,” marching forward. Song recognized it as the same sound made popular by the moving picture soundtracks that had come out of Shanghai’s film studios all through the magical time of Night in Shanghai. It was in the left-wing style of composers like Nie Er, who had written the popular “March of the Volunteers.” This was the music of the movement, and it was while singing and shoveling dirt all day on the terraces of Chen Lu Village that Song first really heard it and understood it. From the earliest years of her piano lessons with her tutor, to the rapture she had felt hearing Thomas play, she had always loved the music of the West. When she left Shanghai to come north, she had consciously put at least this one foreign-tinged part of her away. But there in Chen Lu Village, digging in the fields and singing beside her fellow believers, she felt music come back to her, in a different way. She added her voice, high and soaring, and they liked it. Thomas would approve. When they came to the end, the others smiled and congratulated her, and she thanked them, but she never forgot that he was the root of her scale. Many nights, she lay thinking of this.