Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  But bit by bit Paris’s pulse, its tempo, seeped into them. They sat at cafés trying to fathom conversations. Frenchmen debated everything. Even their silences were full of teeth. Then they discovered bals musettes, where for a few sous they danced with French girls redolent of cheap eau and Gitanes. Bands were mediocre, still advancing the Java, the fox-trot. Nights dilated into dawn as they searched for the sounds of “hot” jazz.

  On the Left Bank at Les Deux Magots they met a painter, Etienne Brême, who came to hear them play at Cirque Medrano. Listening to Keo’s lonely apotheosis screaming through his trumpet, Dew’s magisterial sax, the man was horrified, afraid their talents would be buried in this sawdust arena surrounded by eyes.

  He found them cheap rooms and odd jobs in Montmartre, weddings, funerals, a ball for a famous transvestite—his head shaved, frosted with icing, thirty candles poised on his superb skull as he stepped from a giant birthday cake. Slowly Brême introduced them to jazz boîtes, and in time they began jamming at “hot” clubs—Can Can, Croix du Sud.

  Caught up in the life, hungry for recognition, they were only vaguely aware that half of Europe was lining up for gas masks. Paris was mobilizing. In September, after Hitler invaded Poland, and France and England declared war, meat and petrol disappeared. From northern border towns, families bled into the city, turning parks into refugee camps. Lamplights were hooded; blue flames of curb lanterns turned streets into dreams.

  “I go back to New Orleans, I’d be castrated,” Dew said. “You haven’t got the fare to Honolulu. We’re here, that’s it.”

  They registered as foreigners, carried cartes d’identité, and queued up for ration stamps. Keo wrote Sunny:

  . . . foreigners evacuating . . . the government discouraging people from entering. Don’t know how long before it’s physically dangerous here. Don’t worry. We’ll be together . . . even if it’s somewhere else. . . .

  Ironically it was war, the threat of impending invasion, that opened up cafés. Hot jazz was suddenly in demand, audiences wanting music that was anarchic, that cried out for freedom. One day a Jewish tenor sax fled to England; Dew replaced him at the Java Club. Keo was offered a job at nearby Club Can Can. As more jazz musicians went underground, “coloreds” moved in to replace them—Moroccans, South Africans, men from Guadeloupe, Tahiti, Fiji.

  “Nazis say we’re all one thing,” the Guadeloupean shouted. “ ‘Jazz-loving jungle niggers.’ So, boys, let’s swing!”

  Off Rue Pigalle, at the studio of Etienne Brême, Keo met a drummer from Guam, another from Rarotonga, a Maori sax man from New Zealand. All Pacific islanders, they fell upon each other, speaking ragged phrases of their mother tongues. Brême, it turned out, was half French, half Rom Gypsy, a painter and jazz lover who had spent ten years traveling the South Seas.

  His cavernous studio became their sanctuary, where they congregated, jamming to records from his huge collection—Maori funeral songs, “sing-sing” chants from Papua New Guinea, the pitpitjuri and kangaroo skin drums of Australian Aborigines. For the first time Keo heard hot jazz recorded in Sydney, Tokyo, the Philippines. He heard the genesis of jazz in cross-rhythm Lakkas tribal bands of Africa.

  Brême’s walls were draped with fishnets, ancient warrior spears, shrunken heads from Borneo. In between were paintings, primitive and modern, some old and semivaluable. They could point to any painting, and he would launch into its history, its composition, the chemical makeup of the paints, the life of the artist, whether it was good art or mediocre. Keo sat listening, absorbing; it was like attending university.

  The place became a beacon. Islanders dragged duffel bags up the narrow circular staircase winding up four flights like the dark, brooding newel of a snail’s shell. Their fragrance, soft melodious voices, dark tattooed skin, recast the place into an ocean oasis. When the studio was full, they spilled out into the streets, renting rooms in nearby pensions, congregating at the Halo Bar. Drunk on warm beer, they performed dances of their islands, waved letters from home, singing out the news.

  “Ta’a attacked by barracuda!”

  “Apirana finally tattooed . . .”

  Sunny’s letters were troubled. Her father becoming more violent, her mother refusing to leave him. Keo pictured the two women facing each other, Sunny unable to grasp that her mother did not want saving. He brooded, seeing her face float up in a glass of rum, in light refracted from his horn. At night Parisians sat watching the sky for bombers. He had chosen another place where she would be endangered. He thought again of going home, but Dew resisted.

  “This is our time. What we been practising and praying for. We can’t leave now. To do so would be to fail our time.”

  “Suppose the Germans come?”

  “Ask me then, man. All I know’s right now.”

  One night they played a benefit for Polish war orphans. Seven “coloreds” dressed in white tuxedos, a white piano, all in a kind of gilded cage suspended high in the air over a ballroom. They played without sheet music, shouting songs one after the next, swinging, arching, and feinting, their sweat pouring down on rich couples below.

  Sounds from that suspended cage—thumping, haunting drumbeats, sobbing horns, sliding glissandos of a trombone—enslaved the crowd, woke them to hot jazz at its zenith. It would never be that pure again. Afterward, however long the war took, would come another kind of sound. But right now, at this time, this was the ultimate, what the forefathers of jazz had been meaning all along. They played suspended in that cage all night, so drenched and wild when they finished near dawn, each man was a smaller size, his tuxedo, even his shoes, too big for him.

  As more musicians fled Europe, club owners frantically sought out new jazzmen. Keo and Dew were now booked weeks in advance, sometimes with groups they knew, sometimes with strangers. At night Keo stared as couples danced in a kind of exhausted sensuality. He watched them on the avenues, their double shadow gliding along curbs, dropping down drains, their inseparability making Sunny’s absence more severe. Longing made him play harder, putting such pressure on his tender top lip that little bleeding cracks appeared.

  While they searched the neighborhood for lip salve, a carful of thugs sped by, flinging ammonia bombs, screaming, “Retournez en Afrique!”

  Keo and Dew flung themselves through a doorway. The shopkeeper swore the bombers weren’t French. “Sales boches,” he cried. Filthy krauts.

  One night a gas bomb went off in a cabaret. Next night the audience collapsed when Dew and the band mounted the stage with women’s panties on their faces as “gas masks.” Signs appeared in windows. NO BLACK OR BROWN OR JEW MUSICIANS HIRED. Working a crossword puzzle, Keo felt his stomach turn. The answer to seven-across was “kike.”

  Still, Dew was seduced by the city, people begging his autograph, comparing him to Coleman Hawkins who had left for the States. His African and Spanish blood now bowed to the French Creole in him. He talked and gestured like a Frenchman. He lounged in cafés with beautiful women, running up bills for hand-tailored suits.

  “Not bad for a sharecropper’s son,” he said, remembering the orphaning, the hardships. Then he scolded Keo. “Man, you forgetting how to dress! You just want to be remembered for your feet?”

  Saving his paychecks, Keo was wearing thin his two good suits. It didn’t matter. Even in smart cabarets, crowds had come to expect the barefoot Hula Man. No matter how immaculate he started a set, by the time it was over, he looked deranged and mangled, suit wringing wet, his big kanaka feet still leaping round the bandstand. Sometimes when he played, Keo felt his feet, his whole body, turn into his instrument, as if the horn were blowing him.

  He carried his favorite mouthpiece like a talisman, blowing on it, keeping in touch. He treated his trumpet the same way, stroking it, cleaning it out with hot water. He felt he had to live with it, be loyal to it. Even in conversation, he would almost absentmindedly pick up the horn, fingering the valves, playing scales or long notes.

  Watching other men with girls, Dew with a voluptuous
Polish blonde, sometimes he feared his trumpet was all he had. Maybe it was all he would ever have. Maybe Sunny was beyond his means. At such times, he thought he would die from loneliness and sexual frustration. The soaring, scalding notes he played, the high Cs he blew for twelve or fifteen minutes, one after the next (crowds counting eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety!), the orgiastic F he sometimes achieved—maybe they were just a way of staying sane.

  Another letter from Sunny:

  . . . doctors at the clinic think Papa’s sympathetic to Japan. Ironic, no? . . . He comes home and goes berserk, slapping Mama. I try to talk to him, to comfort him. . . . With what you sent I have over half the fare to France. Still saving every dime. Soon as Mama’s safe, I’ll figure out a way to come. . . .

  As if she had not read his letters, as if France were not on the brink of war.

  Malia’s latest news was brief. Shirashi Mortuary where his father worked was firebombed. DeSoto had had a fistfight with Mr. Chang for biting off part of Mr. Kimuro’s ear. Chang had family in Nanking where Japanese armies had massacred hundreds of thousands. Everyone in shock that Keo was in Paris instead of coming home where he belonged.

  Guilt. Sorrow. His eyes hung in their hollows.

  THE BLONDE NAMED GILDA MOVED IN WITH DEW. SHE SAT IN cafés blowing him kisses, telling strangers she was going to have his babies. Some nights there were parties of “Dutchmen,” known to be Germans and rumored to be Gestapo. But they were serious jazz lovers, record collectors, always begging for encores, for autographs. From the bandstand Keo watched them eye Gilda with contempt, even though she was big-breasted and beautiful, teeth sparkling, features pale and Aryan. Then they gazed at Dew, so elegant, so Negroid.

  One night Dew stormed into the club. Gilda had disappeared, presumably with another man. Days later, he was called to a hospital where she lay in shock, looking nightmarish, as if she had chewed and swallowed half her face. She had been found unconscious in an alley, all of her teeth wrenched from her gums, leaving her mouth a gaping, bloody maw. Dew hung his head and sobbed, thinking this had been done because of him.

  A nun guided him to a chapel where candles in red jars threw ruby stains on her pallid cheeks. She told him that when Gilda was found, scrawled across her dress was one word, JUIVE. Jew.

  He looked up, he looked down.

  “Did you not know? Her last name is Feibel.” She bowed her head and crossed herself. “A witness said they did it with pliers. One tooth at a time.”

  The day Gilda was released, she wrote Dew a letter, then hanged herself in a rented room. He sat in the room for two days, not knowing where to take the body. Then Keo and Etienne Brême arrived with Gypsies in a van. They drove her to the countryside, where the Rom buried her under mounds of flowers even though she was Gaje, non-Gypsy. Brême stood at her grave, pouring a libation to her memory onto the ground.

  “Remember her like this, under roses and lilies and warm sun, in the meadows of my people.”

  “She was so beautiful,” Dew said. “So full of life.”

  Brême looked back at the Rom. “Beauty. Life. These are words for another age. For now, it is better to be mist.”

  NOW GERMAN HEADLINES SHOUTED JUDEN-NIGGERJAZZ SIND VERBOTEN and even Dew talked of going home to New Orleans. Creole gangsters seemed benign compared to Nazis. After Gilda’s death he changed, his clothes less flamboyant, even his playing more subdued, which gave his sax a beautiful spare tone, rather like a clarinet. He drew closer to Keo, now and then touching his arm.

  In the streets of Paris, thoughts vanished, conversations blurred. They were in the “drôle de guerre,” that limbo period before France fell. Still, all over Europe, in little boîtes and smoky basements, jazz prevailed. Keo and Dew were invited to play in Holland and Belgium, where borders magically opened. In each city, Germans sat watching in the shadows, musicians reflected in the glossy convexities of their stares.

  “No more dates outside Paris,” Keo said.

  Returning to the city, to a club engagement, they were informed the management no longer hired “coloreds.”

  Keo sat in cafés with foreign students from the Sorbonne, warning them they could be next. The Germans would sweep up everything but Aryans. Rich and privileged, the young men laughed. A few students were Japanese, dedicated jazz fiends who saw jazz as the symbol of anarchy, liberation from their bourgeois lives. They followed Keo from club to club, wherever he appeared. They took him to Japanese restaurants for yosenabe or sushi while he talked about Sunny, how he was trying to get her to France.

  “I guess it’s too late now. Maybe we should all go home.”

  One of them argued. “With my country and China at war, and the United States suspicious of all foreigners, Paris is probably the safest place to be.”

  Another student, a tall, graceful young man named Endo Matsuharu, leaned forward. “Hawai‘i has become a huge U.S. military base. A sitting target. Keo, you must not go back!”

  He mentioned his uncle, a Japanese diplomat. “He has many contacts here, he could help get your sweetheart an entry visa. He could help process her papers fast. Uncle will be in Paris soon. Please honor me by joining us for dinner.”

  A week later Keo sat with Yasunari Seiko, a small, dapper Japanese consul to Belgium. During the meal he politely asked about Keo’s music, his politics.

  Eventually he asked about Sunny. “Why Paris? These are dangerous times.”

  Keo answered carefully. “Her father, a Korean doctor, thinks of me as a lowlife. We have no future in Honolulu.”

  “There is jazz in the States,” Seiko said. “You would be safer there.”

  Keo remembered the South. Would it be much better in the North? “I’ve got work here. And, well, we’ve dreamed of Paris.”

  The man looked down, thinking. Yes, he said, he could probably help Sunny with documents, entry visas.

  Ignoring his family, their urgent need of him, Keo wrote Sunny that Seiko was willing to help her into France. They met again a few weeks later, after Seiko made some calls, and at that time he mentioned other work he was involved in—helping Jews flee Europe.

  Keo looked at him, confused. “Why would Japan help Jewish refugees?”

  Seiko quietly explained.

  “During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, a Jewish banking firm, Kuhn, Loeb, arranged huge loans to my country. It was, you see, a protest against the czar’s persecution of Russian Jews. All other banks denied us loans. Those arranged by Kuhn, Loeb financed half the Japanese navy, which defeated Russia’s Baltic fleet. After we won total victory, the head of the firm was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by our emperor. Japan still feels indebted.”

  Keo studied him. “And with your victory . . . Japan enslaved Korea.”

  The man nodded slowly. “Not all of my country’s history makes me proud. That is perhaps why I would like to help your sweetheart. And . . . maybe you would consider helping others if the opportunity should arise.”

  At that moment a French-Jewish couple were sleeping in Keo’s bed, awaiting the night train to Marseilles. He thought of the girl named Gilda. He thought of what Brême had told him when they buried her: Gypsies were starting to disappear.

  “Yes,” he said. “I would help.”

  For weeks fog blanketed Paris, settling in the bones. Keo stumbled along, missing sunlight, ocean, his family. He felt helpless, caught in the here and now. As fog slowly lifted, he saw Paris mobilizing—skies full of barrage balloons, roofs sprouting antiaircraft guns. During blackout, people ran past with stolen meat, forged papers. Now and then, gunshots. A body flung from a bridge. After a vicious knife fight in the men’s room of a bar, he found in the urinal, staring forlornly up at his penis, a human eye. He felt he was back at the circus—drum rolls, humans shot from cannons, death-defying acts.

  Two months passed. As German armies advanced on Paris, luxuries disappeared. Everywhere, the smell of scorched fingers, as cigarettes were smoked down to extinction. Old folks sat at their windows i
nhaling from empty coffee jars, rubbing the residue into their gums. Bars closed early, some forever.

  “Wait a bit, you’ll see,” Brême assured them. “Frenchmen are very cynical. A few weeks, a month, it will all go back to normal.”

  And it was so. After the first wave of hysteria, the fluster of mobilization died down. Nightlife resumed, more brilliant than ever, and what people craved most was jazz. One night Keo stood soloing at Club Hot Feet at 3 A.M. He was damned, torn out, exhausted. Then he felt a radiance, felt life’s claws retract. He looked up, and she was there.

  N KA‘A KAUA

  War Maneuvers

  A SLOW DELIRIUM OF LOCOMOTION. HALF CARRYING HER DOWN the street to his room, removing her damp, musky clothes. He tucked her into bed, then lay beside her, not wanting more than this, just this. Hours later when Sunny woke, he washed her face and fed her, afraid to do more, afraid he would consume her. Then he held her hands and listened.

  “My brother, Parker, quit Stanford University. Enlisted in the army! Papa went insane, tore the house apart. Threw Mama down, and beat . . . and beat. I couldn’t pull him off.” She looked at him with blank detachment. “. . . the kitchen knife, cold in my hand . . . I put it in his back. I almost killed my father, trying to protect her. When doctors told her he would live, she looked at me and pointed. She was pointing to the sea.”

  He couldn’t swallow, his mouth was like parchment.

  “DeSoto found me in your garage, in shock.”

  “But . . . how did you get to Paris?”

  “It was not how I imagined leaving home. The pain unbearable. I stood on deck wanting to die. And she is still not safe from him.”

  She shut her eyes. “DeSoto watched over me, slept outside my cabin on that groaning freighter. Somewhere near Yokohama, I pushed back pain. The sight of land . . . I was moving out into the world, I was on my way to you! We were in port two days, then sailed on to Shanghai.”