“Is no one doing anything?”
“I know of one man,” said Kung. “My friend Ho Feng-Shan, in Vienna. He was just promoted to Consul. He has been writing visas to Shanghai as fast as he can dip the pen. They are phony, of course, but they are getting people out of Austria. And if these people don’t escape, they’ll be killed! You know that, don’t you?” He dropped his head, defeated, and ground out his cigar. “Germany won’t stop until all the Jews are dead.”
The money from the job at Summer Lotus did not last long, but it got Thomas through to the end of 1938, and restored his health. He had not wanted his old bandmates to see him growing thin, but now he resumed visiting them several times a week at Ladow’s Casanova. They noticed nothing. Neither did Lin Ming, who had come through town in October to see his lady friend and attend his discreet business meetings.
But now it was January 1939, and his money was gone again. Thomas conserved his strength, staying home, blessing the warm, prepaid room with its one meal a day. He lived in a world of sounds, and knew every voice in the building. In the first-floor parlor lived a policeman with a wife and two sons, and the dining room housed an older man who was a moneylender for the peddlers in the neighborhood. The kitchen was occupied by himself and the Huang family. In the upstairs parlor was another pavilion room, rented by a struggling actress in Chinese opera, and the main bedroom was let to a sailor and his wife. He was away for long periods at sea, and she was what the other tenants called half-open, meaning she took money from men while he was gone. The other rooms were rented by an opium-smoking woman in her thirties, and a trio of Suzhou girls who worked as taxi dancers. Sometimes he lay in bed and listened for their echoes through the walls, and let their voices conjure Song, feeling the line between dream and reality grow thinner.
The high point of the day was his meal, after which he and the Huang family remained around the table while they played a game of listening to a different radio station every night for one hour; though they lived in a fallen city, most stations seemed miraculously to continue broadcasting. Their original idea had been to get news about the war by starting at the bottom of the dial and ticking the knob up through the bulletins and speeches in many languages. They did that, but they quickly heard an amazing variety of music, too, and agreed to keep listening. They enjoyed Hawaiian steel-string guitars, classical composers, French chansons, Cantonese opera, polkas, Russian marches, kunqu opera, and everywhere jazzy Chinese pop songs, the Yellow Music he had played at Summer Lotus.
One night in February they happened on an all-Bach chamber performance by German orchestral musicians who had escaped and reassembled here in Shanghai, broadcast live from the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkou. He knew there were close to twenty thousand Jewish refugees in town now, and so he was able to hear in it a particular kind of blues, a precise and elegant variant on the theme of survival. At the same time he realized they had brought with them a part of home, for Bach was theirs too, no matter how the Germans reviled them. Something lifted in him that night, as he saw he could lay claim to any music he played, no matter where it came from. It was the defiant Bach from the Ohel Moshe Synagogue that made it clear. And in time, as they went up and down the dial, he began to imagine music of his own.
For the first time in his life there were no keys on which to repeat the past, so he let it all go. He had no songs to play, no style to imitate, nothing to do but listen, and he let his mind improvise, his hands moving quickly as if across the keys. He did not play, he only heard. He had become a musician of pure thought, straight invention. Music unspooled within him, new melodies, urgent with feeling, shaped and structured. He sat every evening with the Huang family in their kitchen listening to the radio, while his hands played over his thighs and his mind reached out to dream around the world.
Lin was called back to Shanghai in March, for a meeting with Dr. Kung. He went to the address he was given, a different shikumen lane house this time, off Mandalay Road, in the consular district. The same secretary answered the door. The rotund Kung emerged right behind him, and instead of inviting Lin Ming in, he quickly donned his own overcoat and stepped outside. “Let us take a walk,” he said, something he never suggested.
On the street they spoke of Kung’s family and Lin’s father as they crossed Bubbling Well Road, and at the right moment, walking in the net of lanes between Carter and Da Dong roads, Kung said, “I have a job for you.” He looked around. “But we have to speak privately.”
“There,” Lin said, pointing to a laohuzao, a tiger stove shop, a neighborhood bathhouse. It was random, local, filled with the constant sound of running water. They passed under the oil-paper lanterns with their brush-written characters saying qing shui pen tang, pure hot water tubs, and paid a few coppers each to enter the men’s side.
Thick with steam and mist, it consisted of one small anteroom in which clients undressed, followed by another room with a large wooden tub. High above was a wire cable hung with baskets, watched over by an attendant; this allowed everyone to see their belongings at all times. Kung tucked his gold watch and his glasses into his shoes before they put their clothes in two baskets. As Lin followed the round naked man into the mist, he was struck by the strangeness of seeing the richest man in China in a back-alley bathhouse.
They scrubbed at the wooden buckets ranged around the side, using clean cloths softened by endless laundering, then stepped into the large wooden tub and inched over to the far side to talk.
It was blessedly hot; Lin sank in to his neck.
Kung said, “I need you to help me with something. It is more important than anything I have ever done. If I fail, my life will be worthless.”
Lin, who had been floating in the redeeming waters, jerked to attention. “Duke Kung. How can you say that?” Not only rich and powerful, he was also a seventy-fifth-generation descendant of Confucius.
“I told you when my friends died-Shengold and Schwartz-I realized if wealthy men could not escape, no one could. I call myself a Christian.” Kung stretched his pale, fat form out in the water. “It’s a lie unless I act. I have to do something. Now God has given me a chance, a way to get Jews out of Germany.”
“What?” said Lin. The relationship between Nationalist China and the Nazis was fragile: Germany was close with Japan, though not a formal ally. Nevertheless, the Nationalists hoped Germany might pressure Japan to leave China alone. And Chiang Kai-shek admired Hitler; he had modeled his own secret police after Germany’s SS. “The Germans on the Municipal Council are pressing to get the twenty thousand Jews we have in Shanghai now deported to someplace else.”
“I know,” said Kung, “but at least they are here already. They are safe. Millions in Germany and Austria still have to get out-that’s what I want to discuss. We have a plan-a petition Sun Fo and I are going to present to the legislature in Chongqing on April twenty-second.”
Lin Ming sat up with a little splash, because now he was talking about laws. “What? A petition to the Legislative Yuan?”
“That’s right.” Kung turned in the water. “We’ll establish a resettlement area, a new homeland for European Jews. They are a boon, not a burden; anyone can see that here in Shanghai. Down in Yunnan, where we have built the Burma Road, we have two whole counties almost empty, ready to be developed, the new road connecting them to the world. And we can bring the refugees by sea to Rangoon, and right through Burma to our border.”
“Ah.” Lin understood. “Because it’s British.”
“Nowhere will the Germans be able to get near them. But I need you to set things up as it was done here-barracks, soup kitchens, all the assistance people will need who arrive with nothing. Twenty thousand are self-sufficient in Shanghai; we will multiply that in Yunnan. The main industry will be farming, at first, but the land is good, the climate ideal, and there is plenty of water. They can build what society they like, within Chinese law.”