Symphony, Chapter 22

“9th Symphony: Beethoven”


They would meet every weekday morning at half-past eight on the steps of the Conservatory. If either one of them was even a few minutes late the other one would worry. He made her promise never to go to the ghetto again and she agreed because she loved him.
Some days, he would wear HongKew on his face. If the night was particularly hard, or if he had seen something too awful to be repeated, she knew. She also knew not to ask him about it since he hated having to relive it; who would? And though she was sometimes able to piece things together based on his requests for food or medicine to take back with him, she did him the courtesy of not demanding details. What happened in HongKew, remained in HongKew, that was their silent vow.
Weekends were the worst, two days and three whole nights of not knowing, without contact. She would stay locked in the house and wander the rooms like a ghost. She didn’t like to play at home, but sometimes on the weekends and when it was warm enough, she would take her cello to the back of the yard and play as softly as she could just to keep her mind from defaulting to the worst.
On Monday morning, she would go to their spot on the steps and sigh with relief when she saw him making his way down the road.
They lunched together daily on a mattress they had dragged up from the basement and put in what was once her family’s music room. From noon to one every afternoon they would exercise their demons on this little island in the middle of the polished floor. Most days, in the beginning, it was pure passion. But as time went on, their afternoons on the mattress became more varied, more complex. That square of down became a confessional and a boxing ring, a kitchen table and an oasis. It was the one place in the world where they could truly be together and dream of a day when they weren’t watching a clock.
But there was no clock in the music room so they memorized the light. How it began in the middle and crawled its way towards the lower left-hand side of their nest. When LanLan’s left foot felt the warmth of the sun (the right if she were lying on her stomach), they knew it was time to go.
They would put themselves back together and leave the house one by one through the break in the wall at the back of the garden. At the Conservatory BaiLan would practice with her trio and Joshua would instruct his students in counterpoint. When the afternoon lessons were over they would meet on the steps, wish the other a safe and pleasant evening, as was fitting two professionals, and go their separate ways. It was in this manner that they managed to keep their love a secret--at least in their minds--for three and a half long years.
The seasons came and went, some slowly, some in the blink of an eye. Single nights would occasionally out last months in length, if for some reason Joshua were a no show on the steps. This happened a hand full of times for various reasons and would always put BaiLan into a panic. The ghetto was like a rotting piece of fruit fighting for its place on the shelf, with every passing season it became a more and more pungent place to exist.
The first time he failed to make it out, it had to do with the Horowitz girl. She had grown somewhat attached to Joshua who had started training her on the violin to stave off hunger during the long winter nights. Emmie, who was five at the time, had come down with a violent case of stomach flu and cried every time Joshua left her side. This kept him at home for two days.
The next time was Max related. He had gotten himself into trouble again attempting to sneak out of the ghetto and Joshua had to make his case to Kuboto. In the end it was decided that if Joshua could write Kuboto a new piece of patriotic music to play for some visiting German dignitaries, he could have Max back sans only one or two fingers. Joshua talked Kuboto, who liked him, into not only letting Max go, but into sparing his fingers since he was a pianist just like Kuboto and needed them to play. The new stipulation was that Max, who wasn’t Jewish and therefore not repellant to the Nazi ambassadors, be on call to play at any meeting, or event requested of him. It was not the most desirable of positions to be put in, and on the surface Joshua put forth the correct amount of disgust. But privately, he was pleased that Max be put back to work in musical endeavors. It would help to keep him out of trouble. This whole episode, plus the day it took to compose something simple enough for Kuboto to play, would keep him from the steps for three agonizing days.
But that was nothing. The following year kept him in the ghetto close to a third of the time as restrictions were tightening and it wasn’t always that easy to leave. A temperamental guard for example, could ruin an entire week if he felt looked at the wrong way. When Kuboto was hosting the SS, lock downs were put in place to make them seem unmerciful towards their Jewish guests, though Kuboto himself didn’t ever really grasp the difference between the Jews and the Nazi’s.
“They all look the same to me, except the Jewish ones seem smarter,” was his humble opinion.
Along with imposed restrictions, Joshua has created some of his own. He couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of pass-holders guilt. Every morning when he left the ghetto and walked the streets to the Conservatory with its white walls and good smells, he couldn’t help but think of his little makeshift family starving, sweating, or freezing together, squeezed uncomfortably into that small room. Some days he would remain with them just to share their pain, just because he didn’t think it fair that he should get to leave when they had to stay.
“LanLan, you understand?” he would ask, and she would nod sweetly, part of her jealous that she couldn’t join him, that the life he had when he left her on the steps involved others.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said to his neck one rainy afternoon on the mattress, “you go off at night to a tiny room filled with people and I come back to a giant empty house. War makes everything backwards.”
In the winter of 1945, he didn’t show up for work for an entire month. Frau Schmetterling had stopped eating and resigned herself to death. There were updates. He would get to the Conservatory when he could to fill her in, and then, in late March, he came to her with a most bizarre request.
It seemed that Frau Schmetterling was highly concerned regarding the fate of her remains. Though not traditionally approved by the Jewish faith, it had long been her intention that her husband Leonard and herself be physically joined in death, their ashes mingled and scattered together to the four winds while the orchestra played Beethoven. But things in the ghetto didn’t work like that. If you had the misfortune to die while there, you were likely to end up in the Russian Jewish cemetery on Baikal Road, if you could afford it. If you could not, you were simply picked up by a man with a cart for the most nominal of fees and taken away to God-knows-where.
The latter was not a remote possibility as Frau Schmetterling had more then enough money to afford the very best funeral Shanghai had to offer. But no matter what Max and Joshua did to try and set her mind at ease, she still seemed convinced that when she died she would end up on the cart, and for a reason that was all her own, dumped in the river.
“Whatever happens, Maxala, don’t let them put me in the river,” she would tell him at least three times a day. It was the last thing she said to him as he headed off on the chilly morning of her death to play piano for a room full of men who had been indirectly responsible for her husband’s murder. Joshua wasn’t there either. He was out with Herr Horowitz looking for Anton. The only people home were Frau Horowitz and her daughter.
Frau Schmetterling died, not asleep, and not really awake either, staring into the eyes of Emmie Horowitz who had been sitting and waiting with her since dawn. The girl, a soul older than all the inhabitants of the room combined, had a sense about these things and without trying, provided the old woman with a channel out of this world and into the next. To Frau Schmetterling the girl on the bed became transparent, an open window in which she could see images forming.
It was an unintentional slip. In the deepest recesses of her soul, the place where millions of microscopic fists grip into flesh cells, Frau Schmetterling had intended to hold on a bit longer, to wait until what she clung to dissolved between billions of microscopic fingers. But when the girl presented her with the way, she found that she lacked both the strength and the desire to hold on. As she suspected, her body had become rancid, tired, it turned to the consistency of mush. She longed for freedom.
The air was warm and humid there, on that Darjeeling road, beside a ditch, lined with flags of all colors. And approaching, the lead Condor in his leather jacket with polished buttons down the front in two neat rows--Leonard. How magnanimous they had been--man and wife--before the world went wrong, how like angels. Maybe they could go for a walk near the old temple. Or maybe they could just stay on the road for a while and when they got to the end, take the opposite fork to the one they had taken the first time around. The possibilities were endless. He offered a strong hand and she took it.
When she was gone, Emmie called to her mother.
“Is everything alright, dear?”
“She’s went with Leonard,” the girl said. And the band that accompanies a household in mourning fired up as everything accelerated on some levels and slowed on others, as is the way when death comes calling. The main dance was finding a way to have her remains cremated. This was her only wish, it was unilaterally decided that it should be honored.
Cremations were unheard of at the time. The Chinese believing that a soul is never really at peace until it is resting in the ground. So Joshua went to BaiLan. He thought he knew a way to smuggle The Butterfly’s body out of the ghetto. There was a guard who took bribes. If he was willing to allow living people out for the right price, Joshua felt he would have no trouble letting a dead woman through, as dead women tell no tales. His plan was to incinerate her body in the stone pit behind the Bai home. They would gather her ashes, place them with her husbands and have them both interred at the Russian Jewish cemetery. It wasn’t Germany, but at least they would be together. BaiLan, finding it as romantic as it was risky, agreed to the plan and it was set for that Thursday.
Thursday was a heavy burning day and probably the least conspicuous as the skyline was already so choked with smoke it heaved convex like a bloated diaphragm. They both took the day off from the Conservatory and BaiLan spent the morning psychically staving off the rain as she stacked firewood and cleared the wet leaves and branches from the stone pit at the back of the garden. He arrived on schedule pulling a small cart behind him. In a few months he could have sailed her there, she thought as he revealed the small bundle wrapped in its shroud and marked with the Star of David.
She hadn’t seen Frau Schmetterling since the night she spent in the ghetto, and she thought of it then as she helped him move her shell of a body into the pit and began piling up sticks to build the pyre.
“How do you know how to do this?” she asked him as they worked.
“Anton,” he mumbled without meeting her eyes.
And a few moments later, “It’s a shame Max can’t be here.”
But to this he did not reply. He reached under the cart and pulled out a jar of kerosene to pour over the remains and the tin box containing her husband to bear witness. When this was done he took a small book from his pocket and recited a prayer in Hebrew, then he lit the match. BaiLan’s contribution to the flames was a small bundle containing a few banknotes, some fruit and a jade bracelet that Frau Schmetterling used to admire back when they still had the apartment. She placed it and watched as the fire devoured it quickly in green and blood orange bursts.
They sky was gray and it had begun to drizzle through the mist. They discussed playing something by Beethoven but the weather was bad for the instruments and they couldn’t risk drawing more attention to themselves than they already had.
“How long will it take?” BaiLan asked.
“Four or five hours if we keep the fire hot. Of course there will be some bone left, we’ll have to bury it. We’re not professional like the Nazi’s,” he tapped the tin box. “I wonder if any of what is in this box is actually Leonard Schmetterling. Why would they care if they got it right…” and he trailed off.
BaiLan took his hand. “When I’m alone here and all seems lost, I like to imagine that the garden is filled with flowers. That the house is alive with bodies and music, that there is no war, no troubles, and that every day is a party and every night is safe and peaceful.”
“Mein Blume, I had that life. In Berlin, I remember it. And now I’m being punished for it. Time spent in Eden comes with a price.”
“You see the boat half sinking.”
“The glass half empty? Perhaps. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I’ve never cremated anyone before.” He enveloped her in his coat and silently berated himself for what he’d said. It wasn’t her fault, and he was so very fond of her. But he pitied her. What a sad fate to have to compete with a memory, for people, no matter how perfect, are flawed, and memories, no matter how flawed, are perfect.
“How did Hanna die?”
She had wanted to ask him for years. All she knew was what Max had told her that first day in the music room, before his Mandarin was all that it would become--she had been killed by the Nazi’s. But she never heard it from him. She didn’t know the whole story.
“You know the answer to that question.”
He bristled slightly but not enough to dissuade her.
“Not from you. And why does Max feel responsible?”
“He feels—what?” Joshua released her from under his wing and began adding more wood to the fire.
“Responsible. He told me he killed her, why does he think that?”
“I have no idea,” Joshua said, avoiding her eyes. “She was shot, by looters. As was our maid, Helga. You know all this, why would you make me repeat it?”
“I know it, yes, but that’s all I know. You never talk about it, Joshua. You carry it with you. Her soul is at rest, but yours is not. How could you think that’s what she would want?”
He dropped a log, missing his foot by an inch, and turned on her. “At rest? You think her soul is at rest? She was murdered. She was shot in the back of the head, here,” he dug an ashy finger into the soft place just above her hairline, “the bullet tore her face away when it came out the other side. My son suffocated inside her, who knows how long that took. Is that what you want to know? I didn’t even see her buried. To this day I don’t know if it was even done. My last image of her would keep a heartless criminal up at night, so please…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mein Blume…”
“Do you love me?”
“I do.”
“And if Hanna were to come walking through that gate, alive and well…?”
“That’s not a realistic question.”
“If she did, would you go with her?”
“LanLan…”
“Would you go with her?”
He let out a sigh and turned his eyes to the fire. “She’s my wife.”
BaiLan left him to his work. She ate the funeral meal, tofu, as was custom, for Frau Schmetterling alone and when she was finished, made a bowl for Joshua and carried it silently out to him. They didn’t speak. In her childhood room she played her cello without using the bow and watched as the sky grew dark. He would have to return to the ghetto soon. She sat on her cot in the pantry and waited for him. When he came in, his arms and face were gray with ash.
“It’s done. The ashes need time to cool. I’ll collect them tomorrow.”
She couldn’t look at him. “Yes, and then…”
“And then?”
“Joshua, I can’t be with you if you’re still with her.”
He sat down beside her, then got up quickly after leaving a sooty ring on the blanket. “It’s been an emotional few weeks. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
She shut her eyes against the tears that had been gathering there, but a few managed to slip past the gates and escape down her cheek.
“I love you, Mein Blume,” he touched her face leaving a gray smudge and the ash mixed with her tears like watercolor paint. Their eyes locked and he smiled a sad smile beneath his beard, “and I thank you.”
When he was gone she cried out the day, the war, she cried in envy of one dead woman, and in mourning for another. She cried because she had no choice and no choices. She cried for her love, and then, exhausted, she fell asleep.
It was dark when she woke to the sound of banging. The fire had gone out and the temperature dropped signifying that she’d been asleep for at least a few hours. It took her a minute to register the sound, to place it, for in the haze of sleep it could have been anything from a rusty pipe to a poltergeist. By the time she was on her feet pulling on her robe she was most certain that it was the door. Her mind immediately went to Joshua. She was so sure it was him that she was halfway down the hall before her mind flashed a red warning light of caution. It could have been anyone; the police, soldiers, thieves. No one was supposed to know she was there, no one did, except her parents and Joshua. Max. It could have been Max.
In the dark moonless hallway she misjudged her relationship with the only piece of furniture there, a small table. She stubbed her toe and toppled a vase smashing it to the ground. So much for secrecy she thought. If it was Joshua beyond the door, they could share the irony that he had urged her to put that table and that vase there as a place to showcase some flowers he had brought her. She swore silently in German.
“BaiLan? BaiLan? I can hear you. Open the door it is I, HongWei.”
A few minutes later, BaiLan sat on her cot in the kitchen picking shards of glass out of her foot with a needle, while HongWei and two of his cousins made themselves comfortable. HongHu boiled water for tea and HongYong made a fire.
Her ex-fiancé sat across from her wearing an unfamiliar uniform and a wry little grin. “You don’t look half as bad as I thought you would, LanLan. I was expecting a half-starved kitten.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said and winced as the shard of glass she was trying to remove nestled itself deeper into her foot.
“Allow me?”
“It’s fine. I can do it.”
“Yes, but I can do it without hesitation.”
She extended her bare leg to HongWei and let her foot flop in his lap with none of her former modesty. Never in their old life would she have been so brazen with him. They both thought it. HongWei chalked it up to the war, the poor thing was shell-shocked, but LanLan’s mind went to Joshua, her legs wrapped around his back. She blushed, which seemed to satisfy HongWei. He gripped her foot and removed a folding knife from his belt.
“What’s that for?”
“Keep still.” With a flick of his wrist and a turn of the knife handle, he lifted the shard of glass from her foot and showed it to her, a little ruby on the point of the blade. “See? There it is.”
“Thank you, HongWei.”
“Don’t thank me yet, it looks like these other ones are in deep. This may hurt.”
“Is this why you came? To play doctor with me?”
HongWei regarded her the way a priest sure of his own righteousness regards a lost parishioner.
“No, Bai LanLan. I came to take you away from here. To Hong Kong, to your parents, and to salvation.”
“Salvation? Really?”
“Hold still,” he steadied her foot and lowered the knife to a bleeding cut and the shimmering slice of glass embedded in it. “Your disobedience has gone on long enough. It is time to honor your family, to marry and bare children, to give your life purpose, LanLan. To start thinking not only of yourself, but of others, of your family, of your nation.”
“My nation?” She suppressed a laugh. She could hardly argue with him, she didn’t know where to start.
“Things are changing in China, LanLan. The Germans haven’t got much steam left and when they fall they’re taking Japan with them. Where do you think the bombs will fall? Hong Kong? No. Tokyo? Who cares. But they will fall here. They will fall in Shanghai. I promise you that. So please, don’t hate me. But you must come.”
She stood, her foot free from glass and limped to the cupboard for some iodine and a bandage. Her hair was wild and her robe fell open revealing a thin nightdress.
“I don’t hate you HongWei. I’ve never hated you. It’s just that I don’t love you, and I never will. So please, don’t hate me, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with the man I love, and when this war over we will be together in life or in death.” Her foot turned from black, to red, to yellow as the iodine dripped along its length and spotted the floor.
Would they be together in death? Out of the kitchen window she could see the last embers from the pyre burn off in an orange smolder. She pictured Frau and Herr Schmetterling, young, lost in an eternal embrace. Then she pictured the afterlife with Joshua, he was nowhere to be found. Why? He was with his wife and child. Could HongWei be right? Was all of this selfish as well as foolish? She bit her lip to stop the tears. HongWei approached and closed her robe for her.
“I thought this would be easier.”
“It’s very easy. I’m not going.”
“One day you will apologize for your insolence. We will be married by then and all of this will be a bad memory.”
“Get out of my house, HongWei.” But suddenly things were becoming awfully clear. The cousins began to circle, this wasn’t a persuasion; it was an abduction. BaiLan kicked over a chair with her bad foot and cried out in
pain, but adrenaline fueled, she managed to scurry past them and out in to the frigid night.
“BaiLan!” HongWei was at her heels as she wove barefoot towards the break in the wall. When she dove for it, he grabbed her around the waist and they both fell hard to the dirt. “Hu, Yong, help me,” HongWei called to his cousins.
The three men grabbed BaiLan who screamed, kicked and struggled with all her strength, but she was out numbered. They held her tight and returned her to the house where she was gagged and restrained while the men ate supper in preparation for the long, dangerous trip back to Hong Kong. They were kind enough to clean up the mess in the hall, to pack a few of her things for her, and to make sure the house was orderly when they left it. But they were not kind enough to undo the gag, not kind enough to let her write a letter of explanation to Joshua, not kind enough to include her cello in with her things.
Before they left, HongWei toured the house to make sure all the doors and windows were locked up tight. He saw the mattress in the music room and said this to BaiLan as he carried her to the waiting car, “I have forgiven you every foolish thing you’ve ever done LanLan, and in time, I will even be able to forgive you for what you did with him. But just know, my forgiveness won’t come easy. You must suffer for your salvation.” And then, before he lifted her into the car, “I’ll help you, because, I’ve always loved you.”
The next morning Joshua would arrive on the Conservatory steps, and for the first time in two and a half years, BaiLan would not be waiting for him. He would run to the house, a sickening and all to familiar feeling creeping in his gut, he would get there and find it empty. Locked. Deserted. He would let himself in using the key she made for him and drift through every room for a clue as to where she might have gone. But when he got to her bedroom and saw that her cello was lying on it’s side in the middle of the floor, bow leaning against the wall, he would sink momentarily, crippled by the grip of despair slowly taking hold of his heart.
She was gone so suddenly; all at once he was accosted by memories that seemed to mock him. It’s what you wanted, they seemed to say, a dream girl, a dead wife, a memory. Well, now you have two. But BaiLan would never leave her cello, not on the floor, not like this. Something had happened here. So as calmly as possible, he locked the door, and set his most sober mind to figuring out what: a task that would take him seven years.