DANCE MUSIC
THIS FEARFUL IMAGE dominated the three days that Jim was to spend with the American sailors. At night, as Basie and Frank slept together under the quilt, Jim lay awake on his pile of rice sacking beside the charcoal stove. Reflected from the portholes and brass handrails, the embers gleamed like gold teeth. When he woke in the mornings Jim would feel his jaw, to make sure that Frank had not removed one of his molars out of cussedness.
During the day Jim sat on the funeral pier and acted as lookout while Frank rowed to the scuttled freighters. When he began to shiver, Jim returned to the cabin and lay under the quilt as Basie sat in the Imperial Airways deck chair and made wire toys from old pipe cleaners. Basie had served as a cabin steward on the Cathay-America Line, and he treated Jim to the same patter and parlor tricks with which he had amused the young children of his passengers. He made the same effort to ensure that Jim ate his morning and evening meals, while endlessly questioning him about his mother and father. To a large extent Basie had modeled himself on the women passengers he had served, forever powdering themselves in the heat as they lit a cigarette.
Every afternoon they set off together in the truck and toured the Chinese markets in Hongkew. Here Basie would haggle for a sack of rice and a few pieces of fish, trading packets of French cigarettes from the store of cartons under his bed. At times he would tell Frank to bring Jim over to the vendor’s stall, where the Chinese trader would soberly inspect Jim before shaking his head.
It soon became clear to Jim that Basie was trying to sell him to the traders. Too tired to resist, Jim sat in the truck between the two Americans, like one of the chickens that the Chinese women carried beside them on the seats of the trams. Already Jim felt unwell most of the time, but his potential value at least assured him of the meals of boiled fish. Eventually the Chinese traders would realize that a few yen could be made by reporting them to the Japanese.
Meanwhile he avoided Frank’s heavy hands, ransacked his mind for the unusual words that Basie liked to hear him use and regaled the cabin steward with tales of the grand houses in Amherst Avenue. Jim invented lives of wholly imaginary glamour that he claimed his parents had led. Basie never ceased to be fascinated by these accounts of Shanghai high life.
“Tell me about their swimming-pool parties,” Basie asked as they waited for Frank to start the engine before their last visit to Hongkew market. “I imagine there was a lot of . . . gaiety.”
“Basie, there certainly was gaiety.” Jim remembered the hours he had spent alone trying to retrieve the half-crown, gleaming at the bottom of the pool like one of Basie’s teeth. “They had liqueur chocolates, a white piano, whiskey and soda. And conjurers.”
“Conjurers, Jim?”
“I think they were conjurers . . . .”
“You’re tired, Jim.” As they sat in the truck Basie put an arm around Jim’s shoulders. “You’ve been thinking too much, all those new words.”
“I’ve used up all my new words, Basie. Is the war going to end soon?”
“Don’t worry, Jim. I give the Japs three months at the outside.”
“As soon as that, Basie?”
“Maybe a little more. It takes a long time to start a war; people have a big investment to protect. Like Frank and me and this truck.”
It had never occurred to Jim that anyone might want the war to continue, and he puzzled over the bizarre logic as they set out for Hongkew. They bumped along the dirt road behind the shipyards, through a desolate area of empty godowns, garbage dumps and burial mounds. Beggars lived beside the canals in hovels constructed from truck tires and packing cases. An old woman squatted by the fetid water, scrubbing out a wooden toilet. Gazing down from the safety of the truck, Jim felt sorry for these destitute people, though only a few days earlier his plight had been even more desperate than theirs. A strange doubling of reality had taken place, as if everything that had happened to him since the war was occurring within a mirror. It was his mirror self who felt faint and hungry, and who thought about food all the time. He no longer felt sorry for this other self. Jim guessed that this was how the Chinese managed to survive. Yet one day the Chinese might emerge from the mirror.
When they crossed Nantao Creek into the French Concession, they saw the first Japanese patrol, guarding the checkpoint on the northern end of the steel bridge. But Basie and Frank seemed unafraid of the armed soldiers—Americans, Jim had noticed, were not easily impressed by anyone. Frank even sounded his horn at a Japanese soldier who strolled into the road. Jim crouched below the dashboard, expecting them to be shot, but the Japanese waved them on with a surly stare, perhaps assuming that Frank and Basie were White Russian workmen.
For the next hour they toured the Hongkew markets, past the hundreds of barking dogs in their bamboo cages, not only the Chinese table mongrels but spaniels and dachshunds, red setters and airedales released into the hungry streets of Shanghai by their Allied owners. Several times they stopped for Basie to get out and approach a Chinese stall holder, talking in his fluent dockside Cantonese. But no portholes or gold teeth changed hands.
“Frank, what’s Basie trying to buy?”
“It looks like he’s more interested in selling.”
“Why can’t Basie sell me?”
“Nobody wants you.” Frank flicked the half-crown he had stolen from Jim’s pocket and snapped it in his heavy hand. “You’re worth nothing. What do you think you’re worth?”
“I’m worth nothing, Frank.”
“You’re skin and bone. Soon you’re going to be sick all the time.”
“If they did buy me, what would they do with me? They couldn’t eat me, I’m skin and bone.”
But Frank declined to answer. Basie climbed into the truck, shaking his head. They left Hongkew and crossed the Soochow Creek into the International Settlement. They drove along the main streets, losing themselves in the traffic on the Avenue Foch, following the slow, clanking trams through the wheel-to-wheel tide of pedicabs and rickshaws.
Jim tried to guide them toward the residential suburbs in the west of Shanghai, telling them about the fine houses filled with billiard tables, whiskey and liqueur chocolates. But he guessed that Basie and Frank were killing time before dusk. Soon after six o’clock the light withdrew from the facades of the apartment houses in the French Concession. The two sailors wound up their windows. Frank left the Bubbling Well Road and set off into the unlit Chinese districts of north Shanghai.
“Frank, you’re going the wrong way—” Jim tried to point out. But Basie pressed the back of his powdered hand against Jim’s mouth.
“Quiet, Jim. Silence is a good friend to a boy.”
Jim rested his swaying head against Basie’s shoulder. They embarked on a rambling journey through the narrow streets. Hundreds of Chinese faces pressed against the windows as they edged between the rickshaws and buffalo carts. Jim felt hungry again, and the endless bumping of the wheels over the disused tramlines made him giddy. He wished that they would return to Nantao, to the charcoal stove with its pot of rice.
An hour later, Jim woke to find that they had reached the western suburbs of Shanghai. The last of the sun touched the rooftops of the Columbia Road. As they cruised past the parked Opels and Buicks of the German compound, Basie pointed to the unoccupied houses.
Jim revived and blew into his hands to warm them. They had completed a pointless circuit of the city, but he realized that he had tempted these devious men with his chatter about the grand life. Like a courier with a party of gullible tourists, he began a commentary on the houses in which he had camped during the past two months.
“That has whiskey and gin, Basie. That has whiskey and gin and a white piano—no, just whiskey.”
“Never mind the alcohol. Frank and I aren’t planning to open a bar. Were you a choirboy, Jim? We’ll stand you on the white piano, you can sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ ”
“That has a cinema,” Jim continued. “And that one is full of teeth.”
“Teeth, Jim?”
“It belonged to a dentist. Maybe there are gold teeth, Basie.”
They turned into Amherst Avenue and drove past the deserted mansions. The electricity supply to the street was still disconnected, and the houses in their overgrown gardens seemed even more somber than the early evening, stranded here like the scuttled freighters in the boom. But Basie stared at them with obvious respect, as if his years as a cabin steward on the Cathay-America Line had taught him the true worth of these beached hulks. Clearly he was glad to be associated with Jim.
“You had good sense, Jim, being born here. I admire a boy who appreciates a good home. Anyone can pick his own parents, but to have the sense to see beyond that . . .”
“Basie . . . .” Frank interrupted this reverie. They had stopped under the trees two hundred yards from the entrance to Jim’s drive.
“Right, Frank.” Basie opened his door and stepped into the road. There were no Japanese patrols, and the Chinese bodyguards had retreated behind their walls for the evening. Basie pointed to a narrow cul-de-sac that ran between uncut privet hedges toward one of the houses.
“Jim, time to stretch our legs. Take a stroll up there and see if anyone’s playing that white piano.”
Jim listened to the low but stressed sound of the truck’s engine. Frank sat back in a casual way, but his huge foot was poised above the accelerator. Basie’s pallid face hung like a lantern below the trees. Jim knew that they planned to leave him there. Having failed to sell him to the Chinese traders, they would abandon him to the avenues of the Shanghai night.
“Basie, I . . .” Frank had placed a hand on his shoulder, ready to hurl him into the road. “Could we go to my house? It’s even more luxuriant.”
“Luxuriant?” Basie savored the word in the gray air. He gazed at the houses around them, at the Tudor gables and white modern facades, at the replica chateaux and the haciendas with green tiled roofs.
He climbed aboard and held the door to the frame without engaging the lock. “All right, Frank, we’ll look at Jim’s house.”
They moved forward under the trees and turned into the unguarded drive. As they approached the silent house, Jim could see that Basie was disappointed. He eased open the door, ready to seize Jim and throw him out onto his own steps.
Jim clung to the dashboard, and at that moment two figures stepped from the entrance porch. They wore white gowns with deep sleeves that floated from their arms. Jim was sure that his mother had come home and was greeting one of her guests.
“Basie! They’re Japs . . . .”
Jim heard Frank shouting and saw that the two figures were off-duty Japanese soldiers in their military kimonos. The soldiers had seen them and were bellowing at the open door. A uniformed sergeant emerged from the kerosene light that filled the hall. He stood on the top step, a Mauser holster against his stocky thigh. Frank was trying to reverse the truck when the soldiers in the kimonos jumped onto the running boards and struck with their fists at the glass. Two more soldiers carrying bamboo staves ran down the steps of the porch.
As the engine stalled, Jim felt himself pulled from the truck and hurled to the ground. Japanese in kimonos were running from the house, like a party of outraged women fresh from their baths. Jim sat on the sharp gravel between the polished boots of the Japanese sergeant, whose angry thighs rapped against his holster. The soldiers had trapped Frank within the cabin of the truck. His legs kicked out as they lunged at him with their bamboo staves, striking his bloody face and chest. Two soldiers watched from the steps of the house, taking turns to punch Basie who knelt at their feet in the drive.
Jim was glad to see the Japanese. Through the open doorway he could hear, between the heavy blows and Frank’s cries, the scratchy sounds of a Japanese dance band playing on his mother’s picnic gramophone.