Now Kung was going to pay him all the rest of the money he needed to buy out his qin’ai de Zhuli. As they descended through the valley, he thought of his last visit with her, when he held her through the night and told her it would not be long. “My plan is almost ready,” he whispered, and she lay against him, content, unquestioning, waiting. She trusted him.
From the very first day he and David played at the Park, Thomas took home enough to start eating more, and he soon rebounded to full energy. The flexing of his musical imagination followed, and he started taking liberties with the scores. He still sight-read on automatic, like riding a bicycle, but now he found himself departing from what was written for more than the occasional ornament. He also pulled the rhythmic accents out of line, the way they had done on stage at the Royal. His little solos never undermined the melodic themes or structures of the piece. He always knew where he was.
At the Park, they ate their meal in the restaurant during a break: steak, whipped potatoes, green beans, and hot, delicate cloverleaf rolls. Thomas relished the Western food even though he knew the Huangs would hold his supper for him until he got back. David, on the other hand, ate quickly, with a barely contained desperation that Thomas knew all too well. And he’s here with a wife and child.
“What do you gentlemen say to our cuisine here at the Park?” It was the hotel manager, brimming with pride in his high-class service and also happy with the music, having seen a sharp uptick in beverage service.
“It’s very fine,” said Thomas. “Just one problem. We really should not eat while we play.”
David looked stricken.
Thomas pushed on. “It is distracting. So we were wondering, while we perform, can Mr. Epstein’s wife and son come to the hotel and have our meals, in our place?” He was bland and perfectly sensible.
“Why not?” the manager said. And across the table Thomas saw David’s eyes fill with gratitude. From then on, when they played the Park, Margit and Leo came, rail-thin in their best Vienna clothes, and ate as fine a Western meal as money could buy, while white-jacketed waiters hovered around them. Thomas noticed that Leo was ravenous but Margit ate sparingly, and packed up food to take home for David. All the while, the open violin case accumulated coins and banknotes.
He knew he was himself again when he took Alonzo and Ernest and Charles to lunch at a Russian restaurant, and insisted on picking up the check. He even said he was going to start saving again for their tickets, and get them out.
“Sure you are,” Ernest said.
“Forget it, pal,” Charles put in.
Alonzo was laughing while they spoke, with his bumping bass rumble that always sounded like it might have come from his instrument, and soon they all joined in, even Thomas, who in the sudden clarity of mirth saw that he had been a fool since the very beginning. Their lives were their own. If they had wanted to save money, they would have. Alonzo sent his money home to his family; Ernest and Charles simply burned through whatever they had. Nothing Thomas had ever suggested to them had made any difference. But they liked their lives, all three of them, and they were choosing to remain, the same way he was. There was a new scent of freedom around them, and him too, when he could finally let them be that way.
In that June of 1939 a woman doctor arrived in Yan’an, a surgeon named Dr. Wei. She was the first woman doctor Song had met, and though she had the broad cheekbones and cheerful smile of a rural girl, she had in fact been trained at Peking Union Medical College in all the latest advances. Long lines of women from throughout the encampment, all eager to consult a female doctor, formed to see her.
Dr. Wei was Chinese and needed no translator, so it was mere luck that Song was assigned to assist her on the day a messenger arrived on horseback from Baoding Village with the news that a nine-year-old girl had fallen from a second-floor window onto her head. Dr. Wei barked out the supplies she needed as she sloughed off her clinic coat and grabbed her medical bag. “You!” she said to Song. “Take this, follow me to the truck. You can help.”
“I’m not a nurse,” Song said, as the leather cases were piled into her arms.
“Doesn’t matter!” Dr. Wei called. A flatbed truck was waiting, and Song climbed up in the big square cab beside her.
It was a hard two hours over a bumpy road to Baoding, where they scrambled out in a grove of cypress trees, and ran into the building where the girl waited. “Here!” the villagers cried. And at the end of the hall they found her, lying on a table, unconscious, with a contusion on the side of her skull just behind the ear.
Dr. Wei bent over the girl, examining her quickly. When she took off the blood pressure cuff, her face was worried. She told the women to boil water, and then turned to Song. “Subdural hematoma. We have to operate right away.”
“Here?” said Song, looking around the village meeting room, with its clay walls and rustic wood roof.
“Otherwise she will die. She has only a short time.” Wei was terse and crisp now, the scientist, as she set out a tray of instruments for Song to sterilize with long-handled tongs. “Then you will hand them to me with the sterile tongs.” Bright lights were brought in and arranged around the farm table, towels and gauze and bandages and suture thread laid out according to rapid-fire instructions. Dr. Wei scrubbed her hands furiously with caustic soap and made Song do the same; they covered their hair and wore masks from her medical bag.
“Get her family out of here,” said the doctor, and the village women hustled them out while she shaved the girl’s head, swabbed it with iodine, and braced it between rolled towels.
“What if she wakes up?” Song whispered.
“She won’t.” Wei was sectioning back the skin on the girl’s head. “We have to relieve the pressure.” The doctor used a hand drill to cut through the child’s skull, periodically issuing brief commands to a terrified Song.
The instant she removed a section of the skull, the tissue inside bulged out through the opening. “Dura mater,” said Dr. Wei, as if she were a professor, and took a scalpel to cut through it. It was surprisingly tough and leathery-looking. The first slice freed a gush of blood and clots, and she could hear Dr. Wei exhale in relief as the spurting blood released its death grip on the brain. Then the surgeon moved on to the torn bridging veins that had caused the buildup of blood in the first place between the dura and the arachnoid, the layer below-first clamping, then repairing them. Long, tense minutes went by. Several times the family opened the door, and were scolded away.
Finally Dr. Wei said, “That is the end of it. Ready to close up.” This part seemed easy for the doctor, and she chatted about the complications of head injuries as she worked, finishing with a clean bandage.
By the time they went to the outer room to talk to the girl’s parents, Dr. Wei seemed energized, and ready to explain everything to the parents, whether they understood it or not. “The bridging veins were torn by the head trauma, and they poured blood into the space between the skull and the brain, pressing on it. The pressure was the threat; it would have killed her. Now that it is relieved, and she is stable, she should survive. We have to wait for her to wake up to know more.”
“Aren’t you going to give them special instructions?” Song said when the parents had left the room.
“Instructions?” Dr. Wei looked at her. “No. We are going to stay here. She must be watched.” And though Song offered to stay with the unconscious girl while the surgeon rested, this too Dr. Wei brushed off, and sat by the child herself.
In the end they remained in Baoding Village for five days, until the child was well enough to ride back to Yan’an with them for postoperative care. During those days, Dr. Wei saw all the villagers with health complaints.