Yet Joy Homer surprised her. “Unfortunately, Americans are pretty simple. Just you being Communist is enough for them-they all think you are Russian allies, that you have Russian military aid. I can tell them you don’t, but it won’t make a lick of difference. What’s this blob, anyway?” She touched a square cake with her chopsticks.
Song started to like the woman. “Steamed millet cake. Try.”
Joy ate some. “Not bad. Well, I for one was certainly in the dark about your movement before coming here. And today I met a whole class full of students from your Party University-so impressive, the girls in their cute Dutch bob haircuts, the boys in their glasses. And they walked here! They walked all the way from Xi’an!”
“Oh yes,” said Song. “Students are arriving all the time. You see their idealism.” Indeed, the sight of them never failed to stir her.
“To the future,” Joy said impulsively, raising her chipped teacup.
Song responded with a smile, but inside she thought, To Thomas. He will be there. He won’t have left. He’ll have waited a year. And he won’t have another woman. Everything inside her shimmered at the thought. “To the future,” she agreed.
When Thomas first saw her standing outside his house, watching his door, he wondered if he was dreaming. He felt hazy these days, always hungry, one meal a day, dwindling down a niente, to nothing. Surely now his mind carried him away.
But when she stepped out and started toward him, and he saw the year they had been apart gather at the corners of her eyes and spill over, he knew. Then she was in his arms again, nothing changed, even her smell the same, although she was the new Song-short hair, a loose jacket, trousers. Beautiful. “Come inside.”
“This is the first time they sent me to Shanghai,” she said as he opened the front door.
“How did you find me?”
“I went to Ladow’s. They knew where you were.”
When they climbed the little ladder together, he saw her surprise at his tiny chamber, filled by his bed, his clothes, his sheet music, and one small window that gave out on a sloping rooftop. The ceiling in the little cubicle rose at an angle, just high enough on one side for him to stand.
“Paradise,” she said. “I have dreamed of it all my life.”
He laughed with her, and pulled her onto the bed, and it was hours later that he asked her how long she had.
“Three days,” was her answer, and though he tried to hide his hurt that she would leave again so soon, she felt it, and tightened her embrace. They lay with their arms and legs entwined, the way they both knew it should always be.
“Where do you go for the yi hao?” she whispered. “The number one, the bathroom.”
“Sorry, I don’t have a night stool. I use the outhouse in the lane.”
“You just go down, through their room?”
“Actually, no. The roof.” He indicated the window. “But you can’t do that.”
“Of course I can. Let’s go.” And she was up, pulling on her clothes. “Then we’ll come back,” she whispered.
He smiled. He didn’t want to leave the room either.
But once they were outside in the chilly morning air, she said, “Let’s eat before we go back. I remember a place near here for xiao long bao.”
“I don’t have any money,” he said quietly.
Song looked at him, top to bottom, thinking that now things made sense. As glorious as the thing had been between them, she had also noticed he was thin, ready to blow over in a puff of wind. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”
He fell gratefully into step beside her. “How do you have money? Du barely left you anything. Do they pay you, the Party?”
“No. They support me and feed me in exchange for my work. I inherited a little.” She appreciated that he fell silent then, and did not ask her any more. It was inheritance, in a way, even though Du Taitai was still alive. She stopped in front of a street vendor, who lifted the lid of a giant flat-bottomed pan to show tight-packed rows of chubby pork dumplings with sesame-crisped bottoms. The vendor turned up a dumpling corner to show them. “You like sheng jian bao?” Song said.
“I love them,” he answered, and she bought two on the spot, and brushed away his thanks. Money meant nothing to her now.
The diamonds would stay in their stone wall, as long as she remained with the Party. On the day she had left with Joy Homer she had almost done it-taken the diamonds and turned her back on the struggle for good. But she was not yet ready.
So when they awakened together the next morning, and he gathered her to him, she knew, with a bolt of misery, that it was time to be honest about it.
“I know you are committed.” He brushed hair tenderly back from her forehead. “I love this about you. So why not marry me and take me with you? I know they don’t need piano players up there, but I’m strong. There must be something I can do.”
“You’re a foreigner,” she said.
“I’m hardly from the ruling class. Maybe you noticed.”
“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not you, it’s everything foreign. Politics, culture, learning.”
“Learning?” He raised his brows.
“They welcome doctors and engineers for visits, as long as they side with the cause, but even those visitors don’t stay-almost never. And marriages between Party members and foreigners are discouraged.” She exaggerated slightly; marriage with a foreigner might be permitted, but the fact was that such a marriage would shut all the important doors to her. It would be much harder to get ahead.
“You’re saying I could not live there with you.”
“It would not be secure for you.”
“For you, you mean,” he shot back, and she wilted inside. “It would cast doubts on you.”
“Shi zhei yang de,” she said in Chinese, unhappily. “True.”
“What kind of system is that?” he said disdainfully. “Reject people because they are different? Prejudice.”
“Reality,” she countered. “It is natural for us to feel this way. Look what Japan has done.”
“America didn’t do that.”
“But America did not help us, and neither did Britain or France. They threw us to Japan like so many scraps of meat.”
He switched tactics. “Song. You’re foreign-trained yourself. If I cannot be secure up there, how can you be?”
“You have the point,” she said, agreeing, but her concession gave him no comfort.
After she left, he spiraled down quickly, getting by on his one meal a day with the Huangs and some money she had left behind for him. In April, when he ran into Eugen Silverman at an audition, he mentioned he was low on money, and Eugen took him to meet a Chinese man named Mr. Pao. This man was looking to hire an American, though the job had nothing to do with music.
“I run a newspaper,” Mr. Pao explained over tea in his modest apartment, “the Shanghai Daily. You have heard of it?”
“Of course.” Thomas and Eugen exchanged looks; it was one of the papers whose ads they followed.
“I need a publisher,” said Mr. Pao, and then tittered at Thomas’s horrified expression. “No experience necessary. Only the use of your name. With an American publisher, we can continue printing. They will leave us alone. I will pay you the salary. You see?”
Yes, Thomas saw. He also saw that newspaper offices had been bombed, and their employees killed, all over town. Newspapers were magnets. “Sorry, pal. Too dangerous.”
“It is a salary,” Eugen protested.
“Too high a price.” Thomas remembered the words of warning he’d been given in Seattle: People disagree, they end up dead. Play your music and keep clear of it. “Can’t do it.”
So his clothes grew looser on him, and he spent most of his time in his room, waiting for the evening to come, when he got food and an hour of listening to the radio. He lost himself in his dreams of Song, but in his rational moments, he was aware of life slipping away.