Anya squeezed her hand in thanks. They shared a deep breath, reapplied their lipstick, retraced their steps to the sliding screen, and sat again, smiling.
That year, Alonzo and Keiko decided to host an American-style Thanksgiving in their flat, and Thomas went to Hongkou to invite the Epstein family, and explain the holiday.
“You came so far in this war, started life over in a new land,” he said. “It’s something like it was for those first settlers who arrived in America. To survive was their victory; it was enough. They might have starved, but the Indians helped them. So at the harvest they had food, and everyone sat down together, and gave thanks. And that’s why we eat together on this holiday.”
“So this is your people coming to America,” David said.
“Yes,” said Thomas.
“But you were slaves, is it not?”
“Well, it’s about the other people, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because we are all in Shanghai now, and you three have your freedom.” His gaze gathered in David and Margit and Leo, now a solemn boy of five. “So please, come to Thanksgiving.”
They did come, and when they first climbed the stairs and walked into Alonzo’s apartment, they were made speechless, not by the dining table, which was loaded with all Keiko’s best dishes and a whole fragrant roast chicken, that being as close as they could come to a turkey, but by the large windows, framed with curtains, showing all the lights in the houses up and down the lane. To the Epsteins, after years in their little room, the simple glass panes were a fairyland of light. They stood there gazing out, laughing and exclaiming in their own language, which pleased Thomas.
He had played with David all through 1940 and 1941, and had long since accepted the Viennese as his brother. He still worried about the family’s safety, though so far the only restriction the Japanese had placed on the Jews was to require all the refugees-they now numbered more than 25,000-to live in Hongkou, where almost all of them were living anyway. The Nazis tried to organize a boycott of businesses employing Jews, but no one paid much attention to it, and if, in the end, a few Aryans ceased to patronize these companies, their absence was hardly felt. Shanghai’s Jews were surviving, even thriving. At the same time, their relatives back in Europe were going silent, their letters suddenly ceasing. If the long arm of Berlin managed to reach Shanghai, Thomas knew the same thing would happen here.
But now he had more immediate worries-Anya’s warning.
He had not seen her in over two years, when she fell into step beside him the evening before, as he left the Majestic Hotel. “Anya?”
“Let us walk like old friends. Do not make a fuss.” And she dropped her voice, and told him what she had learned.
“And you don’t know what Japan is going to do?”
“No. Only that the Americans are in danger. They argued about Morioka warning you.”
“I can see the buildup, all of us can. But no one knows what it means.”
“It means you should leave,” she said.
“I wish I could.” He took her hand as they walked, a simple gesture from the past, instantly retrieved. “I can’t. I don’t have the fare. And my friends don’t either, and I can’t leave them anyway.” He stayed for Song too, but he would not mention that now.
“I understand.” That was all she said, and when they reached the next intersection, she turned away, as if walking next to him had been a random accident.
He remembered how he had taken a few steps forward through the crowd before he realized Anya had vanished. Now, standing by the window before Thanksgiving dinner, he sent gratitude to her too, since she had taken a risk to warn him. Never mind that he could not act on it.
When the feast was laid out, they pulled their chairs around the table, linked hands for a prayer, and began the happy passing of platters.
In addition to roast chicken, Keiko had made rice and eggplant braised in miso, and hot and sour Korean-style cabbage. When they were finished and David was tamping and puffing on his pipe, Alonzo took out a guitar and started to play a circular twelve-bar blues, a direct, unconscious pattern. Thomas sat back in the chair, listening, giving thanks for the music in addition to everything else. Alonzo caught his eye and sent him the smile of the older friend, knowing, accepting, lighting the long path of the years ahead with his benediction: It’s all right. Somehow it will work, and one day you’ll be as old as I.
After a few minutes Ernest unlatched his case and lifted his tenor from its worn velvet bed, dampened the reed, and mouthed it; then he began to blow atop Alonzo, crying, complaining in short bursts like comments on the guitar lines. Finally Charles took up his alto and joined in, first shadowing his brother in their trademark thirds and later playing off him in their own call-and-response.
Everyone in the room pulsed together, Leo in his mother’s lap, Thomas on the chair, Keiko-any sense of separate nationhood had dropped away. This was Shanghai, itself an eclectic improvisation, a loop like this twelve-bar blues, playing again and again, bringing all possibilities to life.
At last David rose and unsnapped his violin case. Thomas felt pride burst out of him, for David had always said he would never improvise, that it terrified him. He looked unsure as he fit his beloved instrument to his chin, and the first few bars he played straight, the way he knew how to do it.
Alonzo shook his head. “Turn the beat around,” he said, and used the next measure to emphasize the displacement of accents onto the weak beats.
David understood instantly, and began again, adding the Gypsy plaintiveness for which he was so gifted. After a while he began to grasp their hesitations and use of space, and he left more emptiness as he answered their lines with his.
He said, “So you are flatting the third, the fifth-”
“And the seventh,” said Ernest.
“Judiciously,” Alonzo added.
And David nodded as his elegant violin shifted the song into something stranger and more mournfully European. Thomas saw Alonzo and Ernest exchange looks, interested. Gunfire sounded outside, and everyone glanced up, then returned to the music, used to the sounds of violence.
The song ended to cheers and laughter, and then Thomas, the only one of the musicians who had not played, spoke up. “My turn. Music is my nation, and you are my people.” He raised his glass. “This is our country, right here: America is in a song. We have just proven it. Thank you, pioneers.” And they all drained their wine.
The next day, November twenty-eighth, Admiral Morioka left the Japanese Naval Headquarters with a sheaf of freshly decoded documents in a small, stiff leather map case inside his greatcoat. He needed to think, away from the frenzy of cables, the clamoring subordinates. In a few weeks Japan would attack America, and his forces had to be positioned like a clamp around Shanghai, ready to tighten at exactly the same moment. Thousands of his men were garrisoned in the city, and thousands more waited in the rural districts surrounding it. It was essential that he quickly overwhelm the Marines and other foreign troops in the International Settlement, taking the British gunboat Petrel and the American gunboat Wake, moored in the Huangpu, as his first act. Then he would have his men move through the downtown streets en masse, executing any who offered resistance. And then it won’t be your Lonely Island anymore. It will be ours.
He would have all the Allied diplomatic personnel in the city detained at the Cathay Mansions in the French Concession, and keep them under house arrest. Their colonization of China was over. He would take the Shanghai Club from the British and turn it into a club for Japanese officers. And those garish bronze lions in front of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the ones whose feet poor superstitious Chinese rubbed for good luck, he would get rid of those too, just as soon as he had the British flag taken down and the Rising Sun hoisted in its place.