The Last Rose of Shanghai(105)

“I thought your men died during the truck attack.”

“Many patriotic people are willing to fight, little sister. Not perfectly trained, but they’ll do. I can’t tell you anything more. I’m going to a meeting. Will you listen? Leave Shanghai. Take Little Star with you.”

“Where should I go? There’s nowhere to go.” All the cities around Shanghai were occupied. “Where’s Little Star? She was right here. Have you seen her?”

“She’ll come back soon enough. Out stealing, likely. You trained her well.” She was five, already deft at making fire and stealing bits of coal. “Go south. To the Zhejiang province. You have to leave Shanghai, Aiyi.”

“I don’t know . . .” If I left Shanghai, my last connection to Ernest, my hope of finding my daughter, would be lost.



That evening, I lay in bed, feverish, shivering, coughing.

“Are you going to die?” Little Star asked me.

“Not yet.”

Not before I found Ernest and my daughter.



The next day, Ying returned home a different person, deflated, depressed. All his energy that had spurred the flea dance was gone, and he covered his face with his hat, puffing in anger. The meeting had been ambushed. Some of his men were shot; the others were caught and sent to jail. It was his luck that he was pissing outside and missed the shooting.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck! There must be a mole.”

A pain was crushing my chest; it hurt to cough. “What are you going to do? You’re only one man. You can’t attack the base and sink the warship alone.”

He gave a heavy sigh. “Time is running out. We can’t win this war without the Americans, and the Americans can’t defeat the Japanese without us.”





87


ERNEST


When he left the small shop with bread, Ernest noticed a young Chinese in red suspenders in the corner. He had been there for several days, chewing on a toothpick or something, watching the jail across the street. Once in a while, he pressed down his brown-and-green plaid cap. The man reminded him of a petulant godlike youth in fine suits and a purple tie. Aiyi’s fiancé, Cheng. But the youth in suspenders was not Cheng.

Ernest’s thoughts drifted to Aiyi. Last time he saw her, she was alone, poorly dressed, and seemed hungry. He wondered if something happened to her, Cheng, and her family. And their child. He hoped she was treating the child well, and he longed to know whether it was a boy or a girl. With all his heart and soul, he wished someday he could meet his child, the proof that he still had something precious.

He turned onto a lane to his attic room.

He felt tired. Each day he took the same route from the cobbler to his attic: the dingy cobbler, the bread shop, the jail, a rice shop, an apothecary, a deserted dentist’s shop, and then the row of wooden buildings that held his attic. Climbing on a narrow and steep staircase, he entered the room and ate half of his bread. Then he helped Old Liang scrape taros downstairs. Before dusk it would be time for bed; before dawn he would awake.

The sky, a vast ocean of gray brine, didn’t change. The sound of Japanese fighters, a constant drum above the roof, didn’t change. Part of him believed his entire life would be spent like this; part of him hoped he was wrong.



A sleeve of wind, vibrating with music, brushed his face, smooth like a woman’s fine hair. Entranced, Ernest turned away from his usual route and walked toward it, the low, mourning tune like nothing he had heard. He padded toward the wooden sign that marked the border of the area, walked toward the towering stone gate decorated with a curved pediment etched with smooth carvings, a vestige of the neoclassical buildings at the Settlement, and peered down the dim narrow alley inside, where a few people, their faces coated with grime, squatted.

The dirgelike tune continued, enticing him to walk into the alley. He ducked under the barricade of damp tunics, long trousers, and red underwear, passing the men staring at him expressionlessly.

The tune grew louder with each step, and he stopped, breathlessly, outside a small gate. Through the gap of the gate, he could see a courtyard where a girl with braided hair did laundry in a bucket and two men knitted a rope. Near them an old man was fiddling a guitar-like instrument with two strings. Each time he pulled the bow, a melancholy tune waltzed in the air.

Just like that, the memory of music galloped toward him: the tender notes of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, the intricate murmurs of Scriabin’s preludes, the epic thrust of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5, Emperor. And jazz. The music of freedom, the music of his success, the music of love.

Hot tears ran down his face, tumbling, rumbling, wetting his chin and hanging on his bony jaw. His shoulders trembled and his entire body shook. He cried, like a child who lost his way home. Since Miriam’s death, he had never hummed or wanted to play the piano again. And now, listening to the melancholy tune, after two years of being a prisoner, he realized he had forgotten what music had meant to him. He had forgotten it was once his life, forgotten it had helped him survive; he had forgotten it was a sacred land of joy and sorrow, the art of remembering and forgetting, the language of love and forgiveness.

Would she forgive him? Would he ever listen to music with her again?

He would do anything he could to see her, one more time, and his child, just once. And he promised he would be the balm to her pain, the building blocks to her happiness. If she were mad at him, if she felt like she should strike him, shatter him, he would willingly be torn apart to make her happy again.