“Hope can be brutal,” Lin cut in. “I advise you, don’t hope. Her cousin has not been heard from in too long.”
“I know,” Thomas said, the sight of Margit’s tears still burned into his mind. “But with the Resettlement Plan, you will save so many others. That’s why you must regain your strength. A hundred thousand.”
“If it works,” Lin said dully.
“If it works.”
“Then why could I not save one?” Lin whispered, and tears he had held in through all these days rose to his eyes and spilled out. “Why did I not come one month sooner?”
“I know,” Thomas said quietly, a hand on his arm. “It’s lousy.” And it is the blues, he thought, a realm he finally understood. They sat together in silence, as only old friends can, until past midnight.
In October of that year, Song was still returning to Baoding Village every three weeks, bringing new workbooks for the girls and teaching them new characters. Plum Blossom, the group’s ringleader, learned the fastest, and by the time autumn’s chill had descended, she had composed a short letter to Song, proudly sent down the mountain on a truck hauling casks of vinegar. The phrasing was off and some of the characters incorrect, but it brought Song perhaps her purest single moment of happiness since she came north. She expressed her happiness and pride in large, clear characters and gave the letter back to the vinegar seller to carry to Baoding, just as a messenger approached her. She was requested at a meeting.
She found herself delivered to a set of steps that zigzagged steeply up the canyon wall-a canyon she had never been in before, where higher-level cadres worked. She entered a large cave outfitted as a meeting room, with a low table surrounded by men in squared-off chairs, and gas lamps flickering from ledges on the walls. A Tartar rug covered the floor.
“Interpreter Song,” said the oldest man present, “I am Comrade Feng.” He waved her to a seat and continued. “We have news from our spies in Manchuria.”
Her eyes widened. Secrets, like power, had seemed so far from her in Yan’an.
“The Japanese have learned that the Nationalists have a plan to resettle Jews in Yunnan, and they have devised their own plan. A counter-plan they call the Fugu Plan.”
“For Jews?” she said, trying to follow.
“Yes. They want the sympathy of the West for themselves, not for China. So they are proposing to move the more than twenty thousand Jews now in Shanghai up to Manchuria.”
“What? Why?” She could not imagine why Shanghai’s Jews would want to go to that frozen tundra, when they had already built a successful community in Shanghai.
“They say it is to let them farm. A lie. According to our agents, they want them as a human buffer between themselves and hostile Chinese forces. They will exploit them. The problem is that they are going to try to introduce this Fugu Plan as a humanitarian act, so the West will support them in their conquest of China.”
“But how are they saving anyone? These people are already safe in Shanghai.”
“Exactly. We support the Chinese plan, even though it comes from the Nationalists. Bringing in one hundred thousand more people-to Yunnan.”
She nodded agreement. Ordinarily she would not expect the Party to back any Nationalist idea, but this Jewish Resettlement Plan was different.
“Here is where you are needed. We have learned that the Japanese are about to go to all the newspapers and magazines in Shanghai about this Fugu Plan, with a lot of big lies to get the Jewish refugees to accept it and move up there. We understand you knew foreign people in the past in Shanghai-no, no,” said Comrade Feng, “do not be frightened, it’s all right-and that you may know them still. Yes? Is it so? Then we need you to go there immediately, do whatever must be done to make the right contacts, and make sure Japan’s lies are not published. We cannot let the Jews be misled about this Fugu Plan.”
She soared inside. Shanghai! And Thomas. “Yes, Comrade. Of course.” Her mind raced with possibilities. “You wish to influence the press against the Fugu Plan as well?”
He gave a slight but discernible nod of approval. “If it is possible to plant our view of the matter in the press, even better.”
Three days later, having learned Thomas was to play that afternoon at the Central Hotel, she stood waiting in front, on Canton Road, scanning the crowds in every direction. He was due to appear at two thirty with a violinist, a Jew of all lucky things, whom she had just met inside. Now she waited, anxious, praying she would see joy on his face when he recognized her.
As Song watched, Thomas was approaching the intersection with Lin Ming beside him. He had been listening to Lin tell him about the months he had worked for Duke Kung. “I went looking for my mother, you know.” They waited at the intersection for the flood of rickshaws and carts and motorcars to cease so they could cross. “Look,” Lin interrupted himself, “old number-three redhead is about to change.”
The red-turbaned Sikh on the pedestal stopped the traffic in front of them with wide-swinging hand signals, and they moved out with the flood of pedestrians and vehicles that had clotted up behind them as they waited. “So I went to Jiangsu, looking for her,” Lin said, “but she is gone from this world. Old Du lives, but I am finished with him. All I have left is my friends, all of you-and though I do not know exactly where she is, somewhere I also have-”
Lin Ming stood a second in frozen silence before he stepped up on the sidewalk, “-Song Yuhua,” he finished.
Because there she was, waiting for them in front of the hotel, her smile so wide it lit the sidewalk. Lin reached her first, stepping quickly into her embrace, and then she turned to Thomas.
As they embraced he said, “How did you learn where I would be?”
She laughed. “Ye Shanghai has not been gone for so very long-your name is still known. All I had to do was ask where Thomas Greene was playing, and in two turns of the head I had the answer. As for him”-she smiled at Lin-“I was hoping you might have news of his doings. It was beyond my hope that you would bring him with you.”
Thomas felt a stab of sadness, for soon she would hear of Pearl’s fate, and Lin’s fall. Right now, however, he was late. “The three of us have so much to say, but you must forgive me-my partner and I were supposed to begin playing a few minutes ago. I finish at seven. Could we all meet after that, for dinner?”
“Wonderful,” she said, before Lin could speak. “What about De Xing Guan, at the bottom of Dong Men Lu, just off the Bund? It’s not far from here.”
“All right,” said Thomas, and Lin acquiesced too, as pedestrians flowed around them, old ladies in padded jackets, young women with sleek hair, sunburned country people straining under shoulder poles.
“So good to be back,” Song said, and sent Thomas a beam of excitement before she took Lin’s arm and walked away down the street. Thomas watched from the hotel entrance as Lin stopped her, and spoke, and she cried out and threw her arms around him. So he had told her.
Thomas was so keyed up that day that he forgot where he was several times, and came crashing down in the kind of discord that could not be passed off as creative interpretation. David grinned at him, knowing the reason, as she had come in asking for him.
“I knew it was her,” David said. “So beautiful. I see also it is you that she wants to see. She does not expect your Mr. Lin. He is your rival?”
“No, he is her foster brother.”
“Ah,” said David. “Then you will see her later, and all will be well.”
Thomas laughed at this simple forecast, and yet he was able to calm his flutters and play after that, keeping his eyes on the music. But never in all his months with David had he packed up his scores and left as quickly as he did that evening.
Soon he was on Dongmen Road, passing shop after shop where the merchants had folded back their shutters so the whole establishment lay open to the street, lit up now for the evening with tasseled lanterns of wood and painted glass. Shoppers laughed and talked as they browsed each proprietor’s goods: pyramids of fruits and bins of autumn vegetables, clothing hanging in rows from rafters, stacked-up enamel bowls and spittoons.